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“The Venice Biennale has something archaic about it – almost court-like”
\n\n\n\nArtReview sent a questionnaire to artists and curators exhibiting in and curating the various national pavilions of the 2026 Venice Biennale, the responses to which will be published daily in the leadup to and during the Venice Biennale, which runs from 9 May through 22 November.
\n\n\n\nGery Georgieva, Maria Nalbantova, Rayna Teneva and Veneta Androva are representing Bulgaria; the pavilion is in the Centro Culturale Don Orione Artigianelli.
\n\n\n\nCelebrating Visions. Versace partners with ArtReview to share stories from the 2026 Venice Biennale.
\n\n\n\nArtReview Tell ArtReview what you plan to exhibit in Venice. What has influenced or inspired you?
\n\n\n\nVeneta Androva The Bulgarian Pavilion brings together four artists whose individual practices intersect within a shared curatorial framework. Each of us presents a video work developed independently over the past years, alongside an interactive videogame created collaboratively for the pavilion.
\n\n\n\nMy contribution is the film Spray and Pray (2026), which I have developed over the last two years. It examines how digital media infrastructures produce belief, working through a speculative documentary form that reconstructs automated news networks and algorithmic content systems. Rather than documenting single events, the film stages the mechanisms through which credibility is manufactured.
\n\n\n\nMaria Nalbantova I am interested in the act of listening, especially when it comes to micro-stories. In Venice, we are creating a fluid pavilion that brings together four perspectives; my contribution, Marsh Song (2026), centres on the Dragoman Marsh in Bulgaria, while also reflecting more broadly on wetlands as vital yet vulnerable ecosystems shaped by history, geopolitics, ecology and their significance for local communities. At the same time, I approach the marsh as an imagined space of fear and uncertainty.
\n\n\n\nThe marsh holds countless entangled stories of people, birds, plants, fungi and microorganisms, forming complex networks of interdependence. I see Dragoman Marsh as a mirror of these layered processes. In collaboration with the local community centre choir, these narratives are transformed into a collective voice.
\n\n\n\nGery Georgieva I’ll be showing my video work UWU Channel Radiance (2020), where I embody the interdimensional figure of a prophetic news reader delivering oracular news stories which are dark and satirical and combine mythology, folklore, algorithmic logic and art history to describe an uncertain and dystopic future. The newsreader is nestled in a kaleidoscopic matrix of archival video footage, from a nightclub in my hometown of Varna, to a DIY YouTube dance filmed in a secret cave at the furthest stretches of the Cornish coast. Gathered footage from the easternmost and westernmost areas of Europe are united here and the video is set to a psychedelic soundtrack by Naima Karlsson under the all-seeing eye of a spinning disco ball in the sky.
\n\n\n\nRayna Teneva The four films inform the pavilion as a whole, and by entering the realm of the speculative and imaginary – using humour and playfulness – they give rise to a cohesive experience. The Bulgarian pavilion functions like a radar system: highly sensitive, able to intercept subtle gestures and signals, while also opening space for fantasy. The film I’ll be showing is titled Geography Is Destiny (2026). It is a hybrid documentary that follows my return to the place I come from – where arms industry and rose oil production meet – oscillating between these tense realities and exploring the psychogeography of the place, shaped by fear and instability. Through a close, personal observation, the film tells a story about precarious bodies and invisible work in times of extreme uncertainty.
\n\n\n\nAR In what ways (if at all) does your work relate to the theme of the Biennale exhibition, In Minor Keys?
\n\n\n\nVA In Minor Keys suggests an attentiveness to forces that operate below the level of spectacle. Spray and Pray works within these ‘minor’ zones – the background infrastructures, automated protocols and algorithmically amplified signals that shape collective imagination. Rather than focusing on visible events, the film examines the conditions that make certain narratives persuasive.
\n\n\n\nGG Allowing yourself to celebrate melancholy, sorrow and repair addresses a sense of alienation in my own work and also a feeling of the beauty of emotion in guiding the creative process. For In Minor Keys, power and creation comes out of the shadows.
\n\n\n\nMN Through its attention to the small gaps and cracks in narratives that are part of our social fabric and shared life.
\n\n\n\nAR Why is the Venice Biennale still important, if at all?
\n\n\n\nVA The Venice Biennale has something archaic about it – almost court-like – gathering cultural representatives in a single symbolic arena. It is resource-intensive and structurally imperfect. Yet precisely because of its scale and visibility, it becomes a stage where artistic and geopolitical narratives are publicly negotiated. Its importance lies less in perfection than in exposure: it concentrates power, discourse and attention in a way that makes its own structures visible.
\n\n\n\nRT The truth lies in the eye of the beholder. Despite its exclusivity, elitism and the structural flaws inherent in a system grounded in national representation, the Venice Biennale remains important because those who participate believe in it. The accumulation of voices gathered in a single forum gives it significance but also a potential for transformation.
\n\n\n\nAR What role does a national pavilion play at a time of increasing confrontational nationalisms? Is it about expressing difference or commonality?
\n\n\n\nVA A national pavilion is an inherently charged format. The risk is that culture becomes reduced to a stable, marketable identity. I am more interested in the pavilion as a space where internal tensions and historical complexities become visible. It is less about presenting a unified national character than about exposing how identities are constructed and negotiated.
\n\n\n\nMN As long as we have the ability to self-reflect, we have a chance to improve. I see a national pavilion as a space to share our reflections, a place to listen to multiple perspectives, including our own self-criticism.
\n\n\n\nRT The national pavilion can play a transformative role – it could be seen as an opportunity to reveal, acknowledge and negotiate a nation’s complexities, wounds and tensions. A pavilion can serve as an honest disclosure – a platform for reflection, dialogue or even healing. It is compelling when it manages to translate local challenges in a way that engages in dialogue with the wider world.
\n\n\n\nAR Who, for you, is the most important artist (in any discipline) that your country has produced?
\n\n\n\nVA The idea of a ‘most important’ artist suggests a stable canon, which I find difficult to sustain. Cultural production is shaped by networks, migrations and historical ruptures.
\n\n\n\nAR What is something you want people to know about your nation that they might not know already?
\n\n\n\nVA Bulgaria is often framed through simplified East–West binaries, yet its reality is far more layered. Ottoman legacies, Slavic traditions, socialist history and European cultural contexts coexist in ways that do not fully resolve. Myth, ideology and current political realities overlap rather than replace one another. This condition of living between narratives produces a particular sensitivity to ambiguity and reinvention – a place shaped by translation, culturally and politically.
\n\n\n\nRT From a Western-centric perspective, Bulgaria’s geographical positioning reflects and informs a multitude of overlapping narratives. This ambiguity – being seen as the edge of Europe combined with the historical legacies of past empires and ideologies, continues to resonate today. It generates a constant tension and hum, which comes with vibration and fruitfulness.
\n\n\n\nAR Given that you are exhibiting in a national pavilion, is there something (a quality or an issue or attitude) that distinguishes the art of that nation from that of others? That makes it particular? Are there specific contexts that it responds to? Or do you think that art is a universal language that goes beyond social, political or geographic boundaries?
\n\n\n\nVA What may distinguish artistic practices emerging from Bulgaria is a particular sensitivity to instability. Rapid political transformations have created a context in which systems shift quickly and narratives are constantly renegotiated. Even when artists live internationally, those formative contexts remain present. The film I am presenting in the pavilion examines identity-based disinformation in Bulgaria – a project produced across borders but rooted in the place where I was socialized. Art may be transnational, but it carries the imprint of its histories.
\n\n\n\nRT Reflecting both an unresolved past and the current political and social reality – often marked by absence or scarcity – art practices coming from Bulgaria may be deeply informed by transition and ambiguity. They often engage with what is ruptured, missing or left suspended – whether in public narratives, institutional responsibility or collective memory. As in Geography Is Destiny, the work I present in the pavilion, life unfolds through interconnected geopolitical forces and the precarity of climate.
\n\n\n\nAR What, other than art, are you looking forward to seeing – or doing – while you are in Venice?
\n\n\n\nGG Besides the occasional spritz, I’m not sure there will be time for much else! Although I’m looking forward to turning a corner from a bustling square to be plunged into deep dark silence, the type you only get in Venice, the car-free city.
\n\n\n\nVA I’m looking forward to the intensity – the Biennale is a rare moment of compressed attention. Beyond that, just brief pauses to step outside the noise and recalibrate.
\n\n\n\nAR Could you give us a brief overview of your average working day while creating your presentation in Venice?
\n\n\n\nVA The days are currently fast-paced and layered, with many parallel decisions unfolding at once. We move between focused production and collective discussions, and we try to build in small moments to reset and keep clarity. It’s an intense period, but also an energizing one.
\n\n\n\nGG We have frequent meetings with our team – consisting of curator, artists, spatial designers, game designers, graphic designer. Our collective powerhouse is at peak production and we are constantly checking in with each other. Individually we also have finishing and adapting to do on our individual films. Designing a video game, we are currently deciding on the structure and symbols that will be stirred into the cauldron of ideas, as we all stand around, mixing.
\n\n\n\nAR Can art really change the world?
\n\n\n\nGG The art space is a domain of imagining an alternative, or synthesising new possibilities; we offer space for contemplation, though it is not art’s job to change the world directly. We try to open a channel within ourselves which is sensitive and open, critical but equally non-judgemental and open to being surprised. In some ways this makes artists the interpreters of the social and psychic condition, though often we don’t even realise it. We are here to offer the space for reflection, to believe in alternatives and we hope this allows an individual to think outside of the parameters of everyday life and what is fixed and what is able to change.
\n\n\n\nVA Art may not change events directly, but it can influence how reality is read, and that can quietly shape what comes next.
\n\n\n\nMN Art alone cannot dismantle systems of power or resolve structural injustice. But what it can do, and what feels increasingly urgent, is open up spaces for reflection and self-reflection.
\n\n\n\nThe 61st Venice Biennale runs 9 May through 22 November 2026
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