A ghost haunts the histories of Bulgarian conceptualism – the ghost of belatedness. The issue with this is not so much Western teleological development; it is not even the idea that the earlier something happens, the more valuable it is. Alternative practices in late socialist Bulgaria were often tightly linked to and dependent on the private archive, which created a problem with visibility and artistic value. Paper, in various forms, was the space where the earliest conceptual experiments unfolded and crucially, it is the material through which conceptual practices have survived in private archives. Accounts of Bulgarian conceptualism have tended to search for beginnings in publicly visible forms – happenings, performances, and installations that emerged during the mid-1980s. Yet this risks the assumption that conceptualism should leave the same kinds of traces it did elsewhere, and it forsakes the issue of unequal documentation. If we shift attention from public action to dispersed, often private forms of experimentation, a different genealogy emerges – rooted in collage, drawing, assemblages, and quieter acts of exchange – complicating the notion of belatedness, and suggesting the need for alternative approaches to our artistic modernity. The archive, consequently, should be viewed for its historical role in preserving conceptual tendencies that did not make it to the public sphere, and require sustained attention in order to be brought to life and made visible today.
In the first comprehensive overview of Eastern European avant-garde and conceptual practices during the Cold War, In the Shadow of Yalta: Art and the Avant-Garde in Eastern Europe, 1945-1989 (2009), the Polish art historian Piotr Piotrowski established that Bulgaria’s ‘post-war culture was characterized by permanent stagnation’.[1] He proclaimed with certainty that ‘in this Balkan corner of Communism’, alternative artistic forms ‘developed very late’, and the reason for this belatedness he located in ‘the lack of local tradition of independent art’.[2] By ‘late’, Piotrowski did not just mean compared to the West, but to other Eastern Bloc countries as well – thus, our peripheral ‘Balkan corner’ was obscured by the double shadow of Western-centric art histories, and of Piotrowksi’s authoritative study.
While it is true that the Thaw did not bring any drastic changes to the Bulgarian cultural field, the notion that it did not have its own avant-garde traditions, or, more broadly, traditions of independent art’ is misleading.[3] Bulgaria had a flourishing tradition of independent modernist 3 magazines – such as the poet Geo Milev’s Plamak and Vezni active in the early 1920s, and the critic Vladimir Vassilev’s Zlatorog which ran until the early 1940s – and its own Association of Independent Artists (founded 1920)[4]. These traditions were repressed after 1944, but precedents, they were. The history of experimental avant-garde magazines, is not arbitrary here; rather it prefigures the later circulation of sheets of paper with handwritten poems by censored poets such as Konstantin Pavlov, the single copy samizdat books that appeared as early as the 1960s, and the works on paper that artists created for themselves.[5] As Zhivka Valiavicharska has pointed out, ‘early expressions of such alternative ways of thinking took the shape of group or individual intellectual and artistic play, without much commitment toward either its potential outcome, or toward a wider social realisation’.[6] This limited engagement with the social sphere is precisely what can lead to them being overlooked. However, works on paper survived in dispersed personal collections and correspondence; for this reason, I propose considering such independent experiments, be it private or collective, as part of a ‘counter-archive’.[7]
This notion has recently been applied to discussions of the Soviet underground to describe ‘a decentralised archive, consisting perhaps of non-traditional kinds of representation – not only texts, but also photographs, video recordings, and other artefacts – that allow us to see vanished practices’.[8] While the scale of the Soviet Union is not comparable to Bulgaria’s, this idea is particularly useful in our context. I suggest that through a range of experimental ephemeral forms in Bulgaria, at least since the mid-1970s (already a decade earlier than Piotrowski would have it), such an archive began to be formed.
Vladimir Ivanov
Оce 1700 – Formula 1 (series of 5), 1975.
Graphics
Details
- Material: photocopy, felt-tip pen
- Width: 210.00 mm Height: 228.00 mm Depth: mm
One of the earliest and most striking examples of this dispersed counter-archive can be located in Vladimir Ivanov’s experiments with collage and the photocopy form the mid-1970s. Appropriating mass reproduction technologies as a way to question assumed notions of authorship, originality, and market value were common in Western societies at the time however, in Bulgaria and in many other countries of the Eastern Bloc, access to printing was state-controlled and often restricted, as a way to prevent the dissemination of materials with ‘enemy content’. The photocopier is the protagonist of one of Ivanov’s collages from 1974, Oce 1700 – Formula 1, created in a series of five. The Oce 1700 was a Dutch photocopier introduced in the late 1960s, so Ivanov’s work initially foregrounds the machine that produces copies rather than the process of copying. The sheet is stamped with the date 20 Feb 1967, evoking the bureaucratic processes accompanying the circulation of documents and mail. Below the photocopier, Ivanov juxtaposes a bar chart, a Formula 1 racing car, and an advertising image, bringing together bureaucratic systems, mass technology, and popular culture. At the bottom, a fragment from an Oce brochure listing national distributors maps the circulation of photocopying technology across Western Europe and the United States, implicitly foregrounding Cold War divisions. Ivanov’s collage is an attempt at data disruption, directly engaging symbols of bureaucracy, information systems, and reproduction technology, which destabilizes the structured narratives of official language and ritualized administration. The photocopy here is both a subject and medium, constituting the reflective dimension of the work and emphasizing the potential of everyday printed matter to participate in a counternarrative of artistic experimentation in the seventies. Ivanov’s collages not only anticipate what art historian Diana Popova called ‘unconventional forms’ [9] in the 1980s to define the new non-traditional activities on the Bulgarian scene – particularly happenings, installations, and performance but also locate a conceptual approach interrogating information systems and print culture itself.
Vladimir Ivanov
Collage with Gagarin, 1976.
Collage
Details
- Width: 210.00 mm Height: 228.00 mm Depth: mm
Scale and temporality are also reinterpreted in Ivanov’s Collage with Gagarin (1976). In the lower half, we see the late Yuri Gagarin’s beaming face in a famous portrait taken after the Vostok-1 in 1961, printed over an image of newborn babies. His image was endlessly reproduced in mass media outlets, and came to represent the promise of technological progress, prosperity and modernity; juxtaposing him with infants suggests a generation that would grow up in the Space Age, and recalls the fact that children often accompanied official narratives of socialist prosperity and collective destiny. However, the contrast also revisits the optimistic image of the future associated with the previous decade. Around Gagarin appear fragments drawn from newspapers and popular culture – a 1920s fashion image, entertainment photographs, comic strips, and a newspaper puzzle. Together these displace the heroic iconography of Soviet modernity into the visual language of everyday mass media. Gagarin becomes simply another reproducible symbol of a narrative of socialist modernity that artists were beginning to question. The 1970s were the decade when disillusionment with the socialist vision of modernity and progress began settling in. The heavy theme of popular entertainment and the appropriation of newspaper materials was unusual for Bulgarian art in the seventies, and the images that Ivanov chose specifically, blur the boundary between propaganda and everyday visual entertainment. These works share an affinity with the conceptual collage and ephemeral practices of Polish artist Pawel Petasz or the Hungarian Endre Tot. Through their survival in his private archive, the collages remain in conversation with broader, better documented practices in the Eastern Bloc. A paradox emerges, as Ivanov’s works are explicitly concerned with mass communication, yet they remained closed off to circulation.
Sasho Stoitzov
Path, 1982.
Collage
Details
- Material: collage and drawing
- Width: cm Height: 25.00 cm Depth: 35.50 cm
Experimentation with collage took a different direction in Sasho Stoitzov’s practice in the early 1980s. His concern was not communication systems, yet like Ivanov, he displaced the meaning of the artwork from the finished object to the process of creating. His archive reveals a trajectory of experimentation centered on the limits and possibilities of pictorial space. He made a series of collages in his characteristic hyperrealist style, cutting out a ‘window’ through the picture plane. His Path (1982) is a photograph of a wooden church ceiling with bells hanging from the beams; in the middle of the ceiling, a red corridor opens up, leading to a blue beyond. Tension between the bells jutting outward and the geometric void pulling the eye inward is an investigation into the possibilities to disrupt how we perceive the picture plane – how it can be penetrated, ruptured, destabilized. The path opens up the closed space of sound and ritual, yet throughout the series, the analytical focus varies. Through the Clamp (1982) shows a similar geometric opening squeezed between two stacks of old books, containing simultaneously a point of pressure and release. The blue beyond decompresses the space of order and memory. Considering these collages in relation to parallel drawings such as Untitled (1983), we can follow the artist’s experiments with space and volume from interventions into real-world objects to a more analytical and abstract approach, concerned with the grid as framework and the body within it. The materiality of these works, their surreal character and disassociation from reality delineate an entirely different conceptual universe from that of Vladimir Ivanov’s works. Yet Stoitzov’s investigations into displacement extended beyond pictorial space. In other collages from the mid-1980s, he directed his attention to the notion of originality, questioning dominant assumptions on the importance of authorship and its role in securing art’s value.
Sasho Stoitzov
Art in its current form is dead, I suggest to artists to create copies, 1986.
Collage
Details
- Material: collage, photo, paper
- Width: 48.00 cm Height: 58.00 cm Depth: cm
Stoitzov’s 1986 collage Art in its Present State is Dead. I Recommend That Artists Make Copies consists of a portrait of the artist, with long hair and thick beard, beneath which he glued a piece of paper with the typewritten phrase of the title. The signs of non-conformity are subtle—the artist’s appearance, normally bohemian as it may seem today, actually opposed the clean-cut look promoted by the authorities. Such frivolities as long hair and beard were banned in schools, universities and workplaces, as they could be read as signs of Western corruptions and anti-state behavior. The statement accompanying the photograph is equally provocative, Hegelian in spirit and echoing Artur Danto’s famous essay ‘The End of Art’ (1984). Inspired by Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box, Danto announced the finale of art’s grand progressive historical narrative: as the boundary between artworks and ordinary objects collapsed, art had become self-reflexive and there was no longer a single direction in which it could develop.[10] How did an Eastern Bloc 10 artist, working in a country often characterised by art historical ‘delay’, arrive at a position strikingly similar to that of a critic responding to questions raised by Warhol’s pop art and the readymade? There is no evidence that Stoitzov was aware of Danto’s argument, yet his recommendation to adopt the copy as an artistic strategy is oddly similar to Danto’s ideas. There are no actual copies in Stoitzov’s collage; the juxtaposition of the photograph as a signifier of identity and the text redistributing artistic value from original to copy, breaks with traditional ideas of authorship. Further, his recommendation to artists – ‘make copies’ – is absurdly practical, offering a direction after the death of originality. Taken together, the collages discussed here demonstrate how, in his works on paper, Stoitzov reinterpreted displacement as an experimental strategy – from the deconstruction of the picture plane and spatial constraint to the displacement of originality and authorship. This exploratory character of paper-based practices, which remained outside canonical accounts of painting challenges the fixed meanings ascribed to official art, resonates with international artistic concerns regarding art’s future.
Guillermo Deisler
Poetry, 1980.
Collage
Details
- Material: plastic packaging and cardboard
- Property of: courtesy of Vesselin Sariev Archive
While Stoitzov and Ivanov’s work carry personal aesthetic concerns which were not necessarily intended to be shared, the Plovdiv artist and poet Vesselin Sariev built an archive that reveals the relational and communicative dimension of works on paper. Sariev entered a dynamic mail art exchange with his friend Guillermo Deisler, a Chilean artist living in Plovdiv following the military coup of General Augusto Pinochet (1973). The mail art network was a global community of artists, which had been developing since the 1960s, as an alternative communication channel which allowed artists to bypass the art market and institutions, as well as censorship. This exchange was particularly important to artists in Latin America and the Eastern Bloc, as it allowed them to remain connected to an international artistic scene. Artists would send each other visual poems, collages and drawings, and they would compile them into assemblings, or mail art magazines. Consequently, the correspondence between Deisler and Sariev resulted in a counter-archive rooted in dialogue, where meaning emerged through the movement of the artwork through circulation.
Guillermo Deisler
Poetic Object, 1984.
Drawing
Details
- Material: object, mixed media on single vinyl record
- Property of: courtesy of Vesselin Sariev Archive and Sarieva, Plovdiv
Deisler had been an active member of the mail art community prior to the exile, and he shared his knowledge with Sariev, encouraging him to experiment with media different to traditional poetry, such as visual poetry and collage. The exchange between the two allowed for the principles of mail art – circulation, play, and collaborative authorship – to be translated into a local Bulgarian context. In their correspondence, a range of conceptual approaches merge, posing questions about the found object, visual communication, value, and circulation. Most of all their exchange had a strong element of play and a sense of fun. Among the objects that Deisler sent to Sariev is an empty packet from Mulino Bianco biscuits with a carton stamped ‘POETRY’ jutting out of it, playing with the idea of the found object. Another envelope contained a singles vinyl on which he jokingly wrote ‘Poetic Object/for Vesko Sariev listen to it ALWAYS!/Guillermo/Plovdiv, 12-84’, playing with the boundaries between writing and sound.
Vesselin Sariev
Reverse Pyramid 1944-1989, 1989.
Graphics
Details
- Material: office paper, typewriter, fingerprint, black pen
- Width: 21.00 cm Height: 29.70 cm Depth: cm
- Property of: courtesy of Veselin Sariev Archive and Sarieva, Plovdiv
Particularly notable are Sariev’s experiments with visual poetry in this period. He had been influenced by early avant-garde experiments such as Apollinaire’s calligrammes, and although he did not experiment particularly with visual poetry before the 1980s, his classical verse was impressionistic in nature and aimed primarily at conveying an image, or a vision. Sariev’s Inverted Pyramid/Bulgaria 1944-1989, (1989) comments directly on the ongoing political changes: an upside-down pyramid occupies the centre of the blank page, and imprisoned in it, there is a fingerprint. Above, we read the original title, and the dates of the Communist regime in the country, ‘1944-1989’. Only ‘Inverted Pyramid’ has been scratched out, and instead the artist has written ‘Bulgaria’ next to the dates. It is a striking juxtaposition of strict geometric forms and the messy shape of the fingerprint, suggesting a structure within which individuality was monitored. Individual and collective imprisonment merge within a space of downward progression. The unfinished character of this work, edited with a pen and filed away in the archive, emphasizes the creative process; yet, this does not preclude it from carrying implicit political critique. Instead, it reveals a conceptual direction where visual communication is foregrounded.
Vesselin Sariev and Guillermo Deisler
Cover of the first issue of SVEP magazine - Journal for visual and experimental poetry, 1990.
Graphics
Details
- Property of: courtesy of Vesselin Sariev Archive
SVEP (Magazine for Visual and Experimental Poetry), published in four volumes, with a fifth one assembled but never sent out, was the only Bulgarian mail art magazine, and the only alternative publication to look outward, beyond national borders. With a hundred copies of each issue, SVEP was an assembled magazine, as Sariev designed the covers, devised a list of participants, and placed inside the works he had received in no particular order. The format of the magazine ultimately functions as a condensed record of relations. In a letter dated 13 January 1990, Sariev informed Deisler that he had decided to create SVEP and invited him to collaborate as an editor. Deisler was appointed as the magazine’s ‘coordinator with the world’, relying on him to ‘include in the magazine artists from Europe and America’.[11] Although the need for samizdat ceased after the fall of the socialist regime, the need for mail art magazines continued as their core premise was not the circulation of knowledge the state might find problematic, but the development of global connections through a universal way of relating. In SVEP, there were several participants from Latin America, Europe (Italy, France, Germany, Belgium, Poland, and Switzerland), the USSR, the USA, and Japan. Due to its assembled nature, SVEP appeared on the Bulgarian scene as a much more radical publishing event than the ‘late’ samizdats – it reconfigured fundamentally the traditional relationship between editors, collaborators, and authors, resulting in a tactile work that was intended to be touched and handled, as it is to be visually absorbed. It was constituted by works that were mobile, haphazard objects, requiring the reader to ‘reconstruct the relationship between sign and meaning’.[12]
Albena Mihaylova-Bendji
Lake and Tape, 1985.
Performance
Details
- Description: land art-performance at Murla lake
Throughout the eighties and early nineties, the role of paper shifted, as it was no longer simply support for private experiments, but became an agent in artistic interventions in nature and the gallery space, which emerged in parallel to private activities (such as Sariev’s typographic poems), rather than replacing them. In Albena Mihaylova’s performance piece Lake and Tape (1985) the artist took a boat out in a lake, and as she was spreading a long paper band across the water, she was taking off her clothes. The pristine paper band left the mark of movement on the water surface, disintegrating. In 1989, Georgi Todorov organized the exhibition ‘1000 White Sheets of Paper’ in the Burgas gallery AYA. White sheets were hung on the walls, in the centre of the space there was a square consisting of more sheets of paper, while more paper hung from the ceiling. This work recalls paper’s symbolic associations with creativity, new beginnings, and experimentation, relocating meaning beyond content, and into the material itself. At the end of the event, the action of ‘burning the exhibition’ did away with any presumption of inherent meaning or value. Paper spilled out of the archive not only conceptually but also materially.
If we consider exclusively such performances and installations, then Piotrowski’s claim that ‘the liberation of art from political and bureaucratic patronage (…) took place in Bulgaria in the mid-1980s, by then within the scope of post-Modernism’, would ring true.[13] The collage and 13 drawing practices of Ivanov, Stoitzov and many other artists, however, tell a different story, one that cannot be told through Western narratives of modernity and progress. They were all part of private archives and, to a large degree, linked to a need for personal experimentation, without any end result in mind. Valiavicharska wrote that practices in the 1980s posed the question of ‘where to look for experimentation’ (in traditional artistic forms or in new ones).[14] Drawing on this, my 14 aim here has been to pose the question of where we should look for conceptual and alternative approaches and propose that the publicly visible actions and objects that Piotrowski prioritized in his study are not always the best source of information; instead, private archives hold immense generative potential, and are still underexplored. The question is therefore not whether conceptual experimentation existed in Bulgaria before the visible emergence of happenings and performances, but how such experimentation can be recognized when it survives primarily in dispersed and fragile forms. Artists’ archives consequently reveal a different mode of conceptualism’s operation and existence.
‘There is no paper, there is no paper / new trouble for the poets’ wrote Marko Ganchev in a 1974 poem.[15] He was referring to the State’s monopoly on paper distribution, overtly attacking censorship and privilege. Although these words were directed at poets, they resonate more broadly with the practices discussed here, revealing paper as a contested terrain where emergent conceptual directions could be negotiated. Across collages, correspondence, visual poetry, and private experimentation, paper functioned as a material condition for testing ideas and asserting artistic freedom. Across artists’ personal collections, paper functions as the primary medium that allowed for low-cost, low-maintenance artistic production, and it allows us to consider whether the counter-archive of Bulgarian conceptualism may be understood as differently documented rather than belated.
Rada Georgieva, 2026
Rada Georgieva is a PhD candidate in Art History at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. Her dissertation, “The New Language of Unofficial Publishing and Mail Art: A Conversation between the Eastern Bloc and Latin America (1965–1995),” examines the exhaustion of competing visions of modernity during the Cold War through the development of alternative artistic languages. Her research interests include Cold War conceptualism, artistic networks, and independent publications.
This publication is made possible with the support of the Singer-Zahriev Foundation.
[1] Piotr Piotrowski, In the Shadow of Yalta: Art and the Avant-Garde in Eastern Europe, 1945-1989, Reaktion: 2009, p.63.
[2] Piotr Piotrowski, In the Shadow of Yalta: Art and the Avant-Garde in Eastern Europe, 1945-1989, Reaktion: 2009, p. 28, p.63.
[3] Piotr Piotrowski, In the Shadow of Yalta: Art and the Avant-Garde in Eastern Europe, 1945-1989, Reaktion: 2009, p. 27.
[4] For an analysis of the relationship between Plamak, Vezni, and other avant-garde publications in Europe, see Irina Genova, Modern Art in Bulgaria: First Histories and Present Narratives beyond the Paradigm of Modernity, New Bulgarian University Press: 2013.
[5] See Jakub Mikulecký, Mezi uisentem, undergroundem a šedou zónou (Between Dissent, Underground and the 5 Grey Zone), Academia: 2021.
[6] Zhivka Valiavicharska, The Edge Group and Nonconventional Art Forms in Bulgaria (1984-1994), https://edgeartgroup.eu/bg, p.8.
[7] Klavdia Smola, Ilya Kukulin, Annelie Backmaier (Ed.) Counter-Archive: Memorial Practices of the Soviet 7 Underground, Palgrave Macmillan: 2004.
[8] Smola, Kukulin, Backmaier, Counter-Archive, p.7.
[9] Diana Popova, ‘Terms and Memories with Elements of Reasoning II’, OpenArtFiles, 2019. https://openartfiles.bg/en/topics/2822-terms-and-memories-with-elements-of-reasoning-ii.
[10] Arthur C. Danto, ‘The End of Art: A Philosophical Defense.’ History and Theory 37, no. 4 (1998): 127–43. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2505400.
[11] Vesselin Sariev, Letter, 13.01.90. Vesselin Sariev Archive, Plovdiv, Bulgaria.
[12] Géza Perneczky, The Magazine Network, Cologne: 1993, p.99.
[13] Piotr Piotrowski, In the Shadow of Yalta: Art and the Avant-Garde in Eastern Europe, 1945-1989, Reaktion: 2009, p. 98.
[14] Valiavicharska, The Edge Group, p.19
[15] Marko Ganchev, ‘Nyama Khartiya’, Smeshna Taga (Funny Sandess), Fleurir: 2002.