The exhibition is a joint project between Vaska Emanuilova Gallery and the Department of Ceramics at the National Academy of Arts. It is devoted to the mediums and materials used in contemporary art and concentrates mostly on ceramics, a medium also used by the sculptor Vaska Emanuilova.

Ceramics and the substance it is made of, which was famously referred to as “plastic promateria”, the timeless embodiment of memory, are material notions with feminine connotations. This substance with multiple faces has been banished from the modern urban man’s frame of vision, and it is one of the themes of the Venice Biennale this year as a romantic emblem of the shifting identities and metamorphoses of the flesh. Clay is still part of the mundane and intimate world and illustrates a rediscovered global mental-material kinship with minor differences in composition and properties.

The exhibition presents an introspective-retrospective examination of ceramics, which is still referred to as an Art Academy “speciality”. It challenges its characterization and positioning as the middle ground between two technological optimist extremes that both promise and threaten to completely eradicate the biologically determined. The authors explore the substances, the relationships between them, their attributes, the necessary causes for the creation of relations, and the effects of their interaction. The laboratory is housed in Bojidar Bonchev’s ceramics workshop at the National Academy of Art.

The exhibition is a joint project of Vaska Emanouilova Gallery and the Ceramics Discipline, Applied Arts Department, National Academy of Art. It features new works by assistant Nadia Teknedzhieva, projects by graduates from prior years, and works by Prof. Bojidar Bonchev from various periods: Desislava Terzieva, Zlatina Krasteva, Yoana Atanasova, Svetla Radulova and Yana Kaisheva, and works of the last graduates: Svetli Evgeniev (Master 2022), Plamen Petrov and Plamena Peneva (Bachelors 2022).