About
Water Tower Art Fest is an artist-run initiative that originated with a handful of like-minded, freethinking individuals based in Sofia, Bulgaria. The festival encompassed the ideas of socially engaged art and creativity, and the locally-innovative concepts of looking at post-communist urban renewal and the use alternative art spaces – old water tower, old mineral baths and remnants of the ancient city of Serdika, whose ruins practically lie beneath the feet of Sofia citizens. Gradually WTAF became an international event gathering artists from around the world coming together as independent entities, representing their individual style and search for mutual understanding and cosmopolitanism as an affront to a widely spread feeling of apathy. Our motivation has been single-minded – to communicate freely on the basis of artistic expression within abandoned spaces that allow our imagination to run wild and at the same time reflect upon the history and architecture of Sofia, sharing European values and social issues, helping to find our own place within a particular city structure. The places inspired us and gave us direction as the festival organically took shaped around them with the help of simple and focused communication. We felt that by doing this we would have the willpower to change our own surrounding, to alter the way we communicate with space and transcend the past in a way made possible only through art with direct response to the social environment, transcribing histories, memories, textures and functions into art. It is an injection of international creative thinking to our immediate surrounding involving and encompassing ideas of tolerance, empathy and willingness to shape our own environment.
In 2018 we successfully registered the brand Water tower art fest©
Gallery
Nicklas Halberg
„Fundamental interaction”, 2014.
Painting
Details
- Material: performance at opening at water tower
Jan Doms and Olga Doreva
King's train station, 2013.
Installation
Details
- Photographer: Galya Yotova
- Material: glass
- Sizes: the whole building is wrapped in glass
- Property of: Water tower art fest
