Institute of Contemporary Art - Sofia

"The Histories of Today (Local Configuration of Global Processes)" is a new long-term project of ICA-Sofia.

This project plans to research and address an agenda expressed in the following questions:
Autonomy of Art – a liability or an asset?
Private/public – the ultimate structure of urbanity?;
Neo-capitalism – how it manifests itself, and how it can serve us?

"The Histories of Today " project aims to engage the problematic of the emerging civil society in its complex manifestations and interactions with the outside through the filtering / mediating / focusing / community-building mechanisms of contemporary visual arts. The project strongly believes that in the neo-capitalist society visual art could be the most visible, most critical, yet independent and flexible agent. The project is striving to introduce “visual literacy” and makes a step to build up a constant interest to express public opinion thus contributing to the construction of civic society and its “grass roots.”

The focal point of  "TheHistories of Today " project is the nature of public space taken as not only a physical and urban notion but as the highest common denominator of all happenings in society. The grounding of the project in the Bulgarian context has another curious though not so minor aspect of linguistic nature – in Bulgarian language (as well as in other Slavic languages,) there isn’t a single word equivalent to the English word “privacy”. This linguistic difficulty, multiplied by the legacy of real socialism, provides a fertile ground for current developments in societal life played out in very wide areas.

The implementation of "The Histories of Today (Local Configuration of Global Processes)" involves series of visual art projects of young and mid-career contemporary artists; presentation of young Bulgarian artists living abroad; highlighted by exhibitions of selected international artists whose work is relevant to the planned agenda; as well as cycles of public debates and lectures with the participation of theorists, curators, art critics, and experts in other fields relevant to the thematic; documented in modest but widely spread publications. 

The regularity of the planned events is: 
a) 8 exhibitions per year
b) 3 large-scale public debates and 
c) 4-6 lectures of local or visiting individuals 
d) regular monthly video screenings, thematically selected