Recent content on Nikola Stoyanov
Troll noun (in folklore): an ugly creature depicted as a giant or dwarf. verb (fishing): a fisherman luring fish by pulling bait behind a boat in motion. verb (on the internet): to provoke (other) people online by deliberately posting inflammatory, inappropriate or offensive comments or other disruptive content. Although the original origin of these creatures comes from ancient lore, the modern…
In Petro-drift (2025), the Black Sea becomes both witness and archive—an ancient body absorbing the toxic residues of contemporary geopolitics and petro-capitalist collapse. This video installation captures the aftermath of the 2024 oil spill in the Kerch Strait, where a decaying Russian river tanker—repurposed for open sea operations as part of the so-called “shadow fleet,” built in…
“Black Fax off the Hook” is an insurrectionary transmission—a cultural guerrilla operation leveraging the destructive power of spam. In its most basic sense, a black fax can be defined as a malicious transmission, specifically a sheet of black print sent in rapid succession to a fax machine. This simple act overwhelms the machine’s ink and paper supply, a material assault akin to a…
The second showing of the now upgraded exhibition took place in Sofia. The exhibition had two sites: one at the Harta Gallery and another installation piece, “The First Ten” by Nikola Stoyanov, on the window display of Posta art space on one of the capital’s busiest boulevards. “Postcards and Contraband” has its inception in an incidentally found archive from the…
As part of the Buna 2 (2024) visual arts festival, You’ll Understand when the Time Comes emerged as an urban intervention and installation, interrogating the boundaries of art, repair, and decay it navigated the murky territory between spontaneous urban repair and conspiratorial paranoia. You’ll Understand when the Time Comes an illegal destructive growth in the hearth of a city, that is always…
This is a diary of fevers, a cut-up traversing people and time, unfolding across the labyrinthine tapestry of personal histories. Through frenzy, it brings purification; through heat, it elicits moisture. Unfolding across the month of February, it has been woven within a labyrinth of fevered mythologies of the self. It is amidst this maelstrom of intense heat that we first bore witness to the…
“Postcards and Contraband” begins by examining a work archive of the Bulgarian Customs Agency, Directorate for Combating Drug Trafficking from 1975-1985. The service notes, photographs, negatives, summaries and reports found mark part of the routine of the Customs Agency work, such as inspection and regulation of transit, but also the diplomatic image the Customs Agency must maintain…
Nature Morte is a multimedia project that plants the philosophical question firmly into the ground - on a part of the country’s highly restricted critical infrastructure. In an attempt to find different approaches to reach the excavation and its visualization, open data from satellite and geological surveys and measurements were used, through which the digital topography of the mines has…
“Humor is the politeness of despair” in a meditaion on how the demonically possed inhrent strange channel switching powers and compulsions. Technically the piece is a video collage investigating the specifics of commercial video codec degradation. Based on key moments in Bulgaria’s visual subconscious, it uses various methods of controlled image destruction and degradation based on…
Latent space is where the gaze of artificial intelligence alone draws the picturesque horizon, delving into the hidden rooms of secret research centers, intelligence organizations, and classified databases. An imagined space that the machine illuminates, exposing the postmodern subject’s built-in subversiveness of aesthetic experience in its internal mechanics, referentiality, and element of…
“RE:PROCESS” exhibits photographs of everyday urban objects. In the construction and deconstruction traces can be found upon the urban surface, a peculiar language, through which different modalities of appearance are formed and unfolded. Easily found but tough tо comprehend the signs, grilles, and hanging cables will be our entrance to a forgotten archive of urban fabric. What remains…
The city - transfigured into a gray zone emptied of people, of lights, immersed under water or discarded in the wild cosmos, folded beyond practicality, it represents a capsule emptied of its nature, emptied of its structures of power, emptied of its social bodies. A dispositive without practice, without knowledge and expertise, withoout our institutions and without time - a pure assemblage. The…
The exhibition is nomadic in nature, led by the Black Sea, which is without harbour and without shore, far from the clear squawk of a sea bird. A malevolent curse, brought where it does not belong - in the mountain foothills. This preliminary note outlines the possible geography of pictorial existence, beyond concrete space. I-Ixa is an expressionistic turn towards pure abstraction. A move that…
The drive to capture the city as an affective totality was what led to the inception of this project. Thought, structured and implemented over the urban grid it draws a hyper-fiction. Its origins lie in the delirium of government documents, their leaks and their inaccessibility. Its target, the return to the archive. In:Process aims to present photographs of objects from the everyday urban space.…
Music for a New Night Life deals with Mark Fishers concept of hauntology and lost futures. It visually shows a cymatic matrix of a city in flux, of its dreams and nightmares and finally of its reality filled with nostalgia. The tidal feeling of turbulence wroth by the ancient currents of the Black Sea returns us to a state of Freudian unconsciousness, a downcast euphoria, somatically revealing the…