cartography of absence / 2025
moving image, photography & publicationExhibited at:
The Institute of Contemporary Art, Sofia, Bulgaria, 2025
curator: Danny Radichkov
It presents a multidisciplinary visual reflection on the inherited absences and gaps in memory linked to Bulgaria's recent history of political violence. The project includes photography, video, and photobooks, developed through archival research conducted over the past decade.Two of the photographs in the exhibition had preserved a fraction from Island Persin, where the former forced labour camp Belene is situated.
These images are deliberately obstructed and incomplete and embody the philosophical concepts of "poor images" proposed by Hito Steyerl, Tina Campt, and Eyal Weizman. Such poor or failed images often represent the only possible documentation of sites marked by political violence and restricted by limited access and control.
The photobooks feature collections of visual fragments, personal notes, and documentary traces, forming a map and space for these difficult histories. The exhibition also includes imagery of objects collected from Island Persin and testimonies from relatives of those who experienced political violence.
Butseva’s exhibition explores how traumatic pasts are carried forward, represented, and remembered across generations. Her work continues to interrogate the role of art as a form of preservation, reflection, and resistance against forgetting, creating spaces for dialogue around histories excluded from official archives and dominant historical narratives.
1. Artefacts from the memorial museum, 2025, video, 7:56
2. A page from the comments book from The Neighbours, Bulgarian Pavilion at the 60th Venice Art Biennale, 2024
3. Focus test, Persin Island, 2022
4. The 12th shot of the film, Persin Island, 2016
5. The song of the quary, 2025, video, 1:34 / part of the video Commemoration to the victims of communism at the Sunny Beach camp near Lovech – The Blue, Sad Trumpet by Evgeni Mihailov
6. Collection of four workbooks, 2025