Biography
Nikola Stoyanov (b. 1994, Varna) is a Bulgarian visual artist, theorist, and translator living and working in Sofia. He studied Philosophy and Sociology at the University of Sussex, United Kingdom. His artistic and theoretical practice develops at the intersection of technology, visual culture, critical theory, and contemporary modes of knowledge production and dissemination.
Working across photography, moving image, installation, archival materials, and networked media, Stoyanov investigates infrastructure, technological mediation, propaganda, paranoia, conspiracy narratives, and the ways technical systems participate in shaping what becomes visible, credible, and knowable. He is particularly interested in post-socialist and post-Soviet histories and in the persistence of their images, infrastructures, and narratives in the present.
Selected exhibitions and presentations include the BAZA Award for Contemporary Art nominees’ exhibition at Sofia City Art Gallery (2026), where he presented The First Ten and The things we saw together; Black Market at PUNTA Gallery, Sofia (2026), with The Naphthalene Tapes; Her Poisonous Doubles: Watch Your Feed! at Goethe-Institut Sofia (2025), with Even trolls sleep sometimes; Postcards and Contraband at Charta Gallery and Posta Space, Sofia (2024), and ReBonkers, Varna (2023); Nature Morte at Goethe-Institut Sofia (2023); and Latent Space at Doza Gallery, Sofia (2022).
Alongside his artistic practice, Stoyanov publishes critical and theoretical writing on theory-fiction, technology, contemporary literature, and visual culture. His texts have appeared in Simulacrum: Journal for Art & Culture, Literary Newspaper, and Studia Litteraria Serdicensia at the Institute for Literature of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. His essay “Theoretical Fictions and Hyperstition: A Rough Introduction” was published in 2025.
In 2025, he co-founded Temporary Publishing with Hristo Kaloyanov and Philip Stoilov. The publishing house has produced Bulgarian editions of texts by Igor Zabel and Boris Groys, with Hito Steyerl forthcoming. Since 2025, Stoyanov has also worked in contemporary dance and performance as dramaturg of Xx-63 by Neda Ruzheva and Trevoga Collective, presented internationally across the Netherlands, Bulgaria, Germany, Hungary, and Slovenia. Since 2026, he has been a member of the Union of Bulgarian Artists, Section 13.
Archive records · BUNA vol. 4 / 2026
The Complicit, 2026
Custom software, computer hardware, metal, glass, LED lightbox, electronic components
Artists
The Complicit begins from a ransom letter assembled entirely from existing curatorial and exhibition texts. Nothing is invented; the violence lies in the rearrangement of the all too familiar. Rather than positioning critique outside the art system, the work treats complicity, desire, resentment, care and exclusion as forces generated from within it. What appears as shared language gradually reveals the rivalries, dependencies and small differences that structure the cultural field. These pressures condense into an alien cultural device: part psychic apparatus, part surveillance machine, part diseased interface.
The work emerges from the position of someone entangled in this system while attempting to observe its interpersonal dramas from a distance. That distance inevitably collapses. Private resentment, attachment and the desire for recognition bleed into the public sphere, acquiring a machinic form of their own. Critique, gatekeeping, exclusion and care return as strangely invasive forces, turning the apparatus into a materialised nervous system for a community held together as much by antagonism as by affinity.