Upon arriving in Bulgaria, the first thing I did was search for a contemporary art space. After some effort, I eventually found one with a name that sounded unmistakably contemporary: the Institute of Contemporary Art – Sofia (ICA-Sofia). The exhibition, titled Do We Remember What We Have Forgotten?, features works by Aksiniya Peycheva, Kalin Serapionov, Mariela Gemisheva, Radostin Sedevchev, and Sofia Grancharova. The show is structured around three interlinked themes—vision, time, and the body—which appear as the fundamental conditions of memory.
Installation View of Do We Remember What We Have Forgotten?, Photo by ICA-Sofia.
The Act of Looking
Radostin Sedevchev presents three framed documents. At first glance, they seem official or archival. But on closer inspection, they contain no legible text—only scribbled lines resembling the placeholder squiggles often seen in comic books. For the viewer, these works exist in two simultaneous states: materially, they are three pieces of paper with hand-drawn lines; conceptually, they are documents with textual content—lines of narrative that the mind fills in. The artist seems to suggest that memory works in a cartoonish shorthand: we don’t recall what actually happened, but rather reconstruct the past using a few suggestive lines. The frames, then, hint at the formatting mechanisms of memory itself.
Installation View of Do We Remember What We Have Forgotten?, Photo by ICA-Sofia.
Mariela Gemisheva contributes a pink curtain—an object suspended between decoration and function. While the curatorial text suggests it implies a space behind it, the more compelling question lies in the idea of “function.” The curtain exists in a state of ambiguity: if there’s no window behind it, it’s mere ornament; if there is, it has the power to obscure. This ambiguity gestures toward how the unknown shapes our perception—much like how we relate to history and memory. What we see may not matter as much as what we imagine lies behind the visible.
Installation View of Do We Remember What We Have Forgotten?, Photo by ICA-Sofia.
Time
Kalin Serapionov’s video features people in everyday settings, yet their gazes remain fixed on distant points. Under the video’s slow pacing, their expressions take on a certain gravity—as if they’re silently anticipating a future moment of significance. On the wall opposite this video hangs a neon work by the same artist, almost functioning as a footnote. It reads: Where do you go when you close your eyes? In his artist statement, Serapionov poses a series of reflective questions: Does the world disappear in our memory? When we close our eyes, is memory all that remains? And further: If we stop paying attention, does the world cease to exist? If memory shuts its eyes, do we vanish with it?
Sofia Grancharova’s work plays with the sensation of déjà vu. She recreates a restaurant sign from her childhood neighborhood, then photographs it from a distance to resemble a familiar, perhaps already-seen scene. What appears to be a banal image of daily life is in fact tethered to political experience. As she notes, “Recently I found myself standing once again at a familiar protest site… It feels as if we are circling through the same histories, each time investing hope, effort, anticipation, and emotion.”
Installation View of Do We Remember What We Have Forgotten?, Photo by ICA-Sofia.
The Body
Aksiniya Peycheva’s piece explores the question: what does our internal image of the body really look like? Collaborating with biologist Dr. Slavil Peykov, she converts DNA sequences into visual compositions, mapping nucleobases to specific colors to create a highly pixelated, noise-like image. She then asks ChatGPT to “restore” this supposedly “damaged” image. The result is a metaphor for perpetual repair—of photographs, of organs, of our inner lives.
Grancharova also turns her attention to the “digital body.” She exhibits two silicone body fragments, each marked by wounds—then leaves it at that. The combination invites multiple interpretations: perhaps the artist is suggesting that silicon-based life forms, too, might carry the memory of trauma. Or perhaps these scars are data—held within the material, ready to be shared across other silicon beings. As curator Pravdoliub Ivanov notes, “Today, there is no pain that solely belongs to us—not even memory. Other people’s memories have also become ours.”
Installation View of Do We Remember What We Have Forgotten?, Photo by ICA-Sofia.
Overall, this is a deeply introspective exhibition, inviting viewers into the artists’ affective interiors. It seeks to reclaim human subjectivity through intimate, everyday, and non-documentary approaches. The works seem to whisper repeatedly: Do you feel it? Do you feel it?—as if to suggest that something has numbed us. This is a classic perspective from The Society of the Spectacle: our everyday sensory perception has been alienated, and we must view perception itself through a meta-critical lens in order to resist this condition.
To me, this is a defining trait of contemporary art. Beyond the grand spectacle of installations and the dominant narrative of identity, contemporary art persists in its struggle over the structure of sensibility. Yet there is a key difference: where Debord’s critique was aimed at external capitalist systems, this exhibition turns inward—interrogating the self, or more precisely, the assumptions embedded within the self, such as vision, time, and the body. Thus, the battlefield shifts from public space to the inner world—where the artist is left to defend an increasingly narrow territory: the fragile space where perception has not yet been alienated from the self, where one’s own sensory experience has not been fully estranged or commodified.
This show suggests that memory is not falsified by external forces, but is rather unstable at its very core. And therein lies the exhibition’s melancholic undertone: if vision is uncertain, if time loops endlessly, if the body lacks clear boundaries—then what becomes of memory? What becomes of us?
Postscript
When I realized how “contemporary” this exhibition was, I felt both excited and uneasy. On the one hand, it means that contemporary art has developed a recognizable grammar of affection. Artists can find kindred spirits in Kathmandu, in Bulgaria. On the other hand, this raises a quiet alarm: what if our concepts are similar, our tone of voice aligned—does that mean our sensibilities are becoming uniform too? Can we continue to operate within this shared affection while still sustaining a critical aesthetic reflexivity strategy? —[SCR]
Exhibition: Do We Remember What We Have Forgotten?
Venue: Institute of Contemporary Art – Sofia (ICA–Sofia)
Curator: Pravdoliub Ivanov
Artists: Aksiniya Peycheva, Kalin Serapionov, Mariela Gemisheva,
Radostin Sedevchev, Sophia Grancharova
Dates: June 10 – July 24, 2025
Header Image: Installation View of Do We Remember What We Have Forgotten?, Photo by ICA-Sofia.
