Opening: April 24, 6 pm
Location: National Gallery/ Sofia Arsenal – Museum of Contemporary Art

Curated by: Ilina Koralova
Exhibition: April 24–June 22, 2025

The exhibition What Connects Us is a kind of ‘still frame’, an attempt—without claiming to be comprehensive—to capture contemporary trends in the society-food-art chain. With the development of human civilisation, food (nutrition) gradually transforms from a natural into a social and cultural phenomenon. To this day, it is a bearer and conduit and exponent of religious, secular, power, political, and economic models, which, in turn, find their visual expression in art. The process is reciprocal: the connections between art and food reflect respective epochs with their cultural constructions, ideologies, visions.

The attention of the artists in What Connects Us is largely directed towards the ‘symbolic’ potential of food, to its ability to be a starting point for (critical) observation and analysis of social processes and reflection on their history and present, but also to its possibilities to be a source of inspiration for the development of individual artistic concepts and practices.

What would happen if apple trees could make decisions? What does Modernism have to do with flour milling? In what ways are tea or a lettuce leaf a source of light? What is the connection between food and the deconstruction of language? These are just some of the questions that the invited artists provoke through their works. Other aspects relate to its ‘architecture’ and, more specifically, to the presence of food in the urban environment, to the psychology of eating as a way of life and a status symbol as an element of a given cultural and social identity.

For the exhibition Barbara Holub created the piece "WE PARAPOM! Planting Seeds for the Impossible": Discarded glass lamp globes were painted by members of the Romani community in Vienna (Ljiljana Marinkovic, Mia Marinkovic) and Florencia Camara, with their personal interpretations of apple seeds, enriched with texts by the Romani author Ilija Jovanović and by Barbara Holub. The flamboyant seeds symbolise the ‘macro-utopia’ of a more just society. The glass globe—an attribute of divination often practiced by the Roma—is a central element of the installation, which, positioned to allow different perspectives of observation, offers a glimpse into a common future, without borders, without division and exclusion.

Further information here.