Vasilena Gankovska treats architecture as a living visual tissue, managing to “read” it through the “alphabets” of various political, social, economic—and also visual-aesthetic—regimes. At the heart of her practice lies a long term study of late-modernist socialist buildings, which she treats not as historical evidence but as systems of imagery, transformed within the new era into which they have passed. In this process, architecture is visualised through a series of cultural translations. The buildings in her art do not merely “remember” – they continue to produce new meanings as well as new aesthetics. The artist turns real, existing architectural facts into material for constructing a personal visual position within her art. PROEKT KINO KOSMOS examines the so-called “export architecture” – a circulating system of typologies that emerged in the Soviet Union and spread throughout the Eastern Bloc during the socialist period. This is architecture-as-model, a promise of the future – as monumental as it is utopian. A time when architecture was seen as a bearer of ideological and social visibility. Gankovska examines two cinemas – one in Berlin, the other in Plovdiv. Both are named “Kosmos” and were built in the late 1960s.
The Berlin cinema stands on Karl-Marx-Allee – an iconic boulevard in East Berlin. Since the 1990s, the building has been adapted to new cultural and economic regimes, and today it serves mainly as a venue for commercial events. The Plovdiv cinema “Kosmos” is an equally striking example of this same aesthetic and ideological framework. After the Transition, it fell into disuse and sparked lively public debate, civic initiatives and controversy. Following a full restoration, it is soon to reopen as a multifunctional cultural centre. The name of the cinemas—“Kosmos”—is emblematic of the Cold War era, a time when the Space Race had to be seen, projected and shared with society. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, however, societal needs changed, and this once clearly structured aesthetic gradually adapted to new political, social and economic realities. In some places it fell silent; in others it lingers on as a passive witness, woven into the urban fabric. Gankovska works in the zone where architecture no longer fully knows what function it performs, yet categorically refuses to disappear altogether. The artist explores the survival of visual codes once their social meanings have been hollowed out, scattered or rewritten under the conditions of the Transition.
In PROEKT KINO KOSMOS, architecture is broken down to its internal grammar—repeatable modules, façade rhythms, structural pauses—and becomes a dynamic visual language. Photography fixes the primary document. Painting draws these rhythms out into semi-abstract colour juxtapositions. On canvas, architecture ceases to be merely the image of a building and becomes an autonomous visual language. Ceramics materialises individual architectural gestures into tactile fragments. Prints, with their repeating motifs, unify and set the rhythm of visual perception. The first version of the project was shown in 2022 at Scope BLN in Berlin, as an intense dialogue between the two cinemas, built on the principle of visual translation across media and scales. The present realisation at Art Gallery Kazanlak opens this system up further still. A third cinema-architecture joins the other two – the gallery building itself in Kazanlak, built in the early 1980s as part of this same late-modernist impulse, in which space was conceived as a symbol of ideological pathos. PROEKT KINO KOSMOS does not restore the past, nor does it archive it. It shows how architecture can be, at once, a memory and an active participant in the present, passing through a series of cultural transformations. An indisputable document of a bygone social order, yet also an image of continuation under the conditions of a different economic and social construct.
The exhibition is realised in partnership with the Singer-Zahariev Foundation and the National Gallery, Sofia.
Vasilena Gankovska was born in 1978 in Troyan. Since 2001 she has lived in Vienna, where she works as an artist, researcher and editor. She graduated in Fine Art and Cultural Studies from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna (2006) and in Ceramics from the National Academy of Art in Sofia (2001). In her artistic projects, she deals with various aspects of urban life, leisure, work and their spaces. Gankovska moves between different media such as painting, drawing, ceramics, text and installation. Her artistic research includes city walks and short texts which accompany her so-called “visual notes”. Her works are held in the collections of the National Gallery, Sofia City Art Gallery, the “13 Centuries of Bulgaria” National Endowment Fund, the European Parliament collection, the Artothek des Bundes, the Wien Museum collection, and a number of private international collections.
Selected exhibitions:
What Connects Us, Sofia Arsenal – Museum for Contemporary Art, (2025)
Situation 3: esquisses, Studio Offbeats, Vienna (2025)
Exhibition with Encho Gankovski, Seryakova House Gallery, Troyan (2024)
Visual Transformations, Hostgallery, Sofia (2024)
PROEKT KINO KOSMOS, Scope BLN, Berlin (2022)
In the Blind Spot of the Painting, Gallery +359, Water Tower, Sofia (2022)
Multiple Singularities, Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna (2020)
bleischwer (with Jelena Micić and Lara Erel), Fabrikraum, Vienna (2020)
Contemporary News* Shepard Fairey meets Vasilena Gankovska, Hilger NEXT (2019)
The Gift of Mr Wittgenstein (with Boris Kostadinov), Bulgarian Cultural Institute “Haus Wittgenstein”, Vienna (2015)
Awards:
Annual State Scholarship for Fine Arts, Federal Ministry of Culture of Austria (2019)
General media partner: Bulgarian National Radio.