Roberta Koleva

BulgariaArtists

Biography

Roberta Koleva is a social anthropologist and PhD researcher at Central European University (Vienna). Her work explores post-socialist transformations, post-capitalist dreams, and the material afterlives of Southeastern Europe, tracing infrastructural ghosts, contested monuments, and alternative imaginations caught between ruins and new futures. Blending ethnographic methods with visual anthropology and media, she creates participatory installations that question power, identity, and dominant epistemologies. In 2024, her projects Past Utopias/Future Imaginaries and For the People of Europe were presented at the Belvedere Museum and CEU.

Archive records · BUNA vol.3 / 2025

Vitrines 5.0 Object-text installation / performance

Artists

Curator / Team: with Bogomil Ivanov and Vladislav Lepoev

Vitrines 5.0 subverts the display case — typically a mechanism of desire, consumer spectacle, cultural classification, and institutional authority — into a site of polyphony, uncertainty, encounter, and collective authorship. Conceived as a living experiment across public and gallery spaces in Varna, it invites passersby to contribute objects, voices, gestures, and stories, unsettling the boundaries between object and viewer, art and everyday life, “us” and the “Other.” Each vitrine becomes a counter-display where unofficial narratives displace official ones, and fixed categories fracture into contested fragments. Vitrines 5.0 asks: can a display refuse to classify, open rather than contain, and hold a “we” that resists closure?