subject of many debates, and public opinion has changed over time. Collective memory, as seen through this monument, is in the focus of interest of artists such as Vassil Simittchiev, Nedko Solakov, Daniela Kostova, and Ivan Moudov. Kamen Stoyanov used the empty pedestal of the removed statue of Lenin in the city of Ruse for his project Hello, Lenin (2007). In A Monument of My Memory (2013), writer Georgi Tenev restored, by means of 200 photo reproductions, commemorative plaques with the names of Bulgarian soldiers and officers who died in the two Balkan Wars and the First World War. Those plaques were part of a memorial erected in the vicinity of what is today the National Palace of Culture, partially damaged in the 1944 air raids on Sofia, and completely removed in the 1970s. Tenev used those photo reproductions to cover the façade of the Sofia City Art Gallery. The problem of the Bulgarians’ national identity acquired new nuances during the talks on the country’s European Union accession, as well as after the accession. In Ilian Lalev’s video In a State of Expectation (1999), the EuroNews logo slowly appears among the colour pixels of the TV screen; at the end, the colourful stripes blend into the Bulgarian national flag and a sign reading that ten years after the changes, Bulgaria is still expecting its European integration. Katia Damianova offers a different perspective in her performance European Tongue (2005), in which her tongue was pierced with a syringe surmounted by a miniature EU flag. The subject of Bulgaria and the way it is perceived by the Bulgarians and others is also addressed in artworks by Samuil Stoyanov, Stela Vasileva, Zara Alexandrova, Bora Petkova, Zoran Georgiev, Velislava Gecheva, and Kristina Irobalieva. In the same direction, but with a much more specific place, is Raycho Stanev’s project The Great Excursion (2009), which explores the expulsion of some 360 000 Bulgarian Turks in the summer of 1989, after the forcible change of their names. This is one of the few artworks devoted to this traumatic subject for Bulgarian society. The artist represents the event from the point of view of witnesses of the exodus, in the form of interviews. He contacts friends, schoolmates, and neighbours in Turkey and in Bulgaria in order to see what has happened to them and how we can talk about that time, which nobody mentions today. By this narrative, Raycho Stanev tries to convey the emotions and feelings not just of the victims but also of all voluntary or involuntary, active or passive witnesses of the process. Twenty years after this appalling act in contemporary Bulgarian history, we have an opportunity to take a look at the event, at the participants in it, and at ourselves from a distance and from the side. A broad range of social issues is explored in the works of the 8th of March Group of women-artists. Through a predominantly feminist lens, they deal with a wide variety of themes related to everyday life. Artists such as Adelina Popnedeleva, Alla Georgieva, Nadezhda Oleg Lyahova, Dimitrina Sevova, Sylvia Lazarova,
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