April-October 2023/October 2026
Boyana Dzhikova
In the vestibule of a second-floor apartment in the former consulate, abandoned by the expelled Russian diplomats in 2023, hangs a reproduction of an icon. The space has been frozen in the moment of their departure - disarranged furniture, children’s books, lavender in the wardrobes. Through the elastic of time, everyday objects turn into artefacts. Seemingly static, they allow us to follow the movement of human bodies - upwards and downwards, they pack, throw out, destroy. A move always requires cold discernment of what has to stay and go away, ourselves aside.
The icon did not seem to have made the cut. Alone in the apartment with the golden wallpaper, it now took on new flesh. Here, the image of the Holy Mother of God ‘Seven Arrows’ was a marker of complex geopolitical processes - starting from the Orthodox influence of the Russian Empire, through the Soviet regime that followed and marginalized any form of official religion, and finally the appropriation of the old position by the new, Orthodox again, Russian Federation (list incomplete). Bulgaria is one of the playgrounds for these social processes and tensions.
Apart from the Holy Mother of God ‘Seven Arrows’, guardian of Apartment No.6, several calendars were left behind. They gave us an idea of the period during which the Russian diplomats were parting from their temporary home - between April and October of 2023.
The process of their expulsion is also the result of centuries of geopolitical processes and tensions, most recently culminating in the attack by the Russian Federation on Ukraine. As part of Bulgaria’s foreign policy, but also of its position in the EU, the diplomats were invited to leave, and the consulate building was emptied of the presence of people.
The exhibition Native Resolution / Вроден ИНАТ at Buna 2026 is the first event in the building since then. Its curatorial focus, innate inat, was defined a year ago by Boyadzhiev and is most generally explained by communities’ capability to withstand time and outside factors. And so, whose withstanding did we observe here?
In the post-colonial discourse, Bulgaria finds itself in an interesting position - neither coloniser nor colonised, it has, in the last few centuries, passed through the regimes of several empires. These processes, with their cultural and political influence, have played a significant role in the construction of both the Bulgarian and the Balkan modern identity.
Thus, local resilience has an important position within the frame of BUNA 2026, but as the starting point for the “swirl”. The study of resilience in a global context - looking for connections between phenomena and events from different parts of the world that have happened and are happening over the course of centuries - is the red thread unifying Native Resolution.
A few weeks before the opening, I was on a video call with one of the artists to show him the space I had chosen for his work. I could not find it on my first walkabout, so I set off again around the perimeter. The room was slipping away, it was my second passage by a pair of armchairs with a panoramic view of a column standing 20 centimeters away, and it was starting to get awkward - I was feeling silly, hopeless with directions and as if I was badly presenting myself professionally.
Finally I made it back to my starting point, with a thought that had been creeping in - to call Lachezar, who worked downstairs, and announce that the room had disappeared and that he should come up and help me, but that was, of course, absurd. It was as if I was in the film Backrooms, I said ‘Have you seen Backrooms?’ (‘No’), and we decided to do a third walkabout. ‘I don’t know what to think about this third walkabout’ said M., what if we still don’t find it, thought I, but I had now changed the strategy and was carefully scanning every corner, closet and service room, until the silver ornaments I was looking for materialised, and we could both breathe again.
The consulate was truly capable of getting you lost. The building is one of the prime examples of late socialist modernism in Bulgaria, constructed at a particular moment in history, namely the end of the 1970’s when the regime was economically, socially and morally exhausted. On several levels, it contains banquet halls, office areas, and residential quarters for the diplomats and their families and represents a type of space where personal life and work used to tightly coexist. Thought out precisely as a hybrid zone between the private and the public, the consulate unveiled opportunities for weaving stories of an especially layered social density. This, of course, carried its own risks - in some spots we needed to approach with delicate interventions, at others with radical gestures.
The building itself often took us in varying directions - isolated from the world of the necessary and practically useful, here everyday objects turned into symbols. The works took over the territory of the home, which in turn gave them a new meaning, one not always intended but present anyway. The two phenomena mixed in a surrealist amalgam of lived life and the artistic imaginary. Similar to a hyperlink system of trauma, architecture and art gestured towards each other, tracing a trajectory that crossed the labyrinths of the consulate, beyond all attempts at a linear read:
Military conflicts and political utopias ascended staircases, entered and left rooms, crossed the city and ended up in the powder cellar, along the way swallowing families, friends and lovers; some died - on the front or in camps; others built bridges and railways and then with regret watched them fall apart; found love, consumed it in the bedroom, sometimes secretly; later - fighting in the kitchen over bills - high due to the crumbling economy; they took care of the household, washing the carpets, tying ribbons against the evil eye around the branches of trees; their children grew up carrying the heritage of their parents, similar to them, yet other; they dissected it, respected it or denied it; they left home, became artists, that was hard, especially at times; they looked at themselves, in the mirror, they cared for their bodies, in the bathroom, they observed them, through the machine, light-blue and transparent, searching for something past the bones and soft flesh; they walked through cities and dreamed up cities, they dreamed up countries and dreamed up countries not existing, exactly like their parents who were building bridges and railways and just like the first people to ever imagine the world.
Through the diversity of the works, the even more inescapable interconnectedness of the Balkans, Europe and the entire globe was emerging - economy, (supra)national ideals and communal identities were refracting through the prism of tribal cultures, ritual practices and modern utopias, forming a warm mass of tension. This tension, global by its very nature, had to be constantly followed, analyzed and addressed - that is, after all, one of the responsibilities art is tasked with. Thus, the stake of the exhibition Native Resolution was to bring out the universal mechanisms for resilience, inherent to human nature and played out throughout human experience, and, doing so, to acknowledge them as an approach to overcoming the crises of the world.
Native Resolution / Innate INAT
Luchezar Boyadjiev
Native Resolution / Innate INAT poses the question: What is the relationship between human beings and models of a sustainable future? The art works on display weave the possible answers into a single exhibition whole. Behind the works, the life of the human – both as a person and as an artist – shines through. In one way or another, within the context of the exhibition, the works can be ‘narrated’ to the public either as a past destiny or as an example of INAT – innate and constructive, with an eye to the future. The works are ‘excerpts’ from humanity’s rich experience in life and art, which give cause for optimism the moment we project them into the future.
Sustainability (from the Latin sustinere – to support, to provide assistance, to endure, to withstand) is the ability to continue over a long period of time. In contemporary usage, the term refers to a state in which the environment, the economy, and society – the three pillars of sustainability – can persist over time. Today, sustainability has become a “password” for the future. Plans and calculations are made, resources are identified, steps toward implementation are outlined, and sooner or later, sustainability is required. If a project lacks sustainability, it has little chance of success. But when they speak about sustainability, the human aspect and input is rarely factored in.
The human factor in sustainability is the ability of a person and/or a community to rebound to their native form or condition after pressure, trauma, or catastrophe. It is the ability to remain happy and successful after hardship and failure. In English, this is called resilience. In Bulgarian, however, it is described through a whole range of words: sustainability, toughness, flexibility, elasticity – in short, stubbornness = ИНАТ, for life, for culture, for the future, and for happiness. Stubbornness/ИНАТ with a constructive charge. An innate INAT (in Turkish) – or, in English, resilience + …
The word inat (инат) in Bulgarian, as in other Slavic languages, originates from the Arabic word ‘inād’ (عناد), transmitted through the Turkish ‘inat’. In its common meaning, it signifies tenacity, stubbornness, persistence, often without rational justification. It exists in all languages and appears in countless idiomatic expressions. For example:
1/ Russian: „На зло маме сяду голой жопой в крапиву“ / English: “To spite mom, I’ll sit with my bare ass in the nettles”;
2/ Serbian: „Он се наљутио на своје село, па је одсекао курац“ / English: “He got mad at his home village, so he cut off his penis”.
But these, of course, are examples of unproductive stubbornness, which we do not need for BUNA 4.0.
We are interested in another sort of stubbornness, ‘инат’, and resilience +. Imagine – had they lived happily ever after, Romeo and Juliet would be an example of optimal, constructive stubbornness. The title of a Bulgarian movie from the late socialist era translates as All for Love (or To Love in Spite of All, 1986). This sounds optimistic, something akin to what we call “constructive stubbornness,” which we translate into English as Native Resolution, as in:
Innate, native, natural, constructive Resolute, determined, tenacious, stubborn, or ‘инат’ in Cyrillic
Analogies with digital terminology are not inappropriate. Constructive stubbornness is embedded in human beings genetically, an encoded bio-factor, as well as in communities as a rebounding protocol. In other words: native resolution and innate stubbornness (or вроден инат in Cyrillic). Consider, for example, the bouncing back of Native American, First Nation, and other indigenous communities in North and South America against all odds, or the survival/revival of Balkan communities during and after centuries of Ottoman domination. This is resilience +: sustained over centuries of life under externally imposed domination of political, cultural, and social forms of otherness. It manifests, among other things, in Balkan folk Christianity, in the hybrid religious practices of colonized communities, in linguistic borrowings, shared practices, and cultural forms circulating within human societies, including artistic ones.
Here, hybridity itself becomes a fact of innate, constructive stubbornness, and of resilience +, that we are interested in.
The above came to my attention, both as a person and as an artist, in 2008 because of a prolonged stay in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA. At the time, I was taking part in “Lucky number 7”, the 7th Biennial of Contemporary Art, organized by SITE, a leading art center both in the region and worldwide. My stay was too short, whilst the exhibition continued until the end of the year. The period from January to the end of December 2008 coincided with Obama’s presidential campaign, the collapse of the global financial markets, the US elections and many other events.
What mattered most to me was the contact and interaction with young artists from the indigenous peoples of North America, who were then at the very beginning of their artistic careers. Two of them are taking part in the exhibition “Native Resolution / Innate INAT and are now major stars of the contemporary art world. From Rose B. Simpson and Cannupa Hanska Luger, I learnt what it means to endure over time in the face of all manner of vicissitudes and obstacles, to start from something akin to ‘zero’ and become an art star 15–20 years later. I also learnt that one must nurture and develop one’s innate character traits, as well as draw on the strength of one’s community, to turn centuries of resilience into a springboard for the future, come what may. By that time, I had already been fortunate enough to get to know the major cities of North America. But my encounter with the culture and people of the continent’s indigenous population in a city of incredible mystique and artistic vibrancy changed my view of the world.
I realized that there is something in common between the Lower East Side of Europe and Bulgaria – as part of the Balkans’ past and the imperial presence here over the centuries – and the territories of the Native American reservations in New Mexico, Arizona and so on, with their legacy as victims of colonialism and repression, however far-fetched that may sound. What they share is precisely this resilience over time and the strangely parallel ways in which people have found ways to hold their ground in their relationship with the dominant power, with nature, with religious beliefs, language and folkloric customs – right down to a simple fact, revealed by chance whilst walking in the semi-desert surroundings of Santa Fe. It turned out that both there and in the forests around my father’s native village in the Central Balkan Mountain range (where I spend a great deal of time even now), a person, pressed by their natural needs whilst out in the wild, uses the leaves of one and the same plant to achieve the very same hygienic result.
Almost twenty years later in Varna, here and now, you can trace the threads and twists of the observations mentioned above, of all manner of creative and human struggles, obstacles and problems, enthusiasm for new exhibition challenges and hopes for the future, just as, together with Boyana Dzhikova and the BUNA 4.0 team, along with all the artists from the festival and exhibition programme, we have tried to share them with the public.
