Can a building forget? It absorbs the intentions of those who built it, the routines of those who occupied it, and the histories that accumulate long after its original purpose is abandoned. Whether it can ever be released from them is a question no change of use fully answers.
The former Russian Consulate General in Varna, Bulgaria, is a building now being asked to try. Designed by Georgi Savakov in the late 1970s and opened in 1981, this example of Bulgarian socialist modernism once served as a site of diplomatic exchange and bureaucratic control. In 2022, in the context of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Bulgaria expelled seventy Russian diplomatic staff; the consulate closed in October 2023, when its lease expired. Since then, the building has become a space through which cultural memory and political responsibility must be negotiated.
For BUNA 04, organized by Ralitsa Gerasimova, curators Luchezar Boyadjiev and Boyana Dzhikova have made this contested architecture the primary setting for Native Resolution / Вроден ИНАТ. The 2026 exhibition takes its title from the Bulgarian notion of inat: a form of stubbornness that, in its constructive sense, describes the persistence required to withstand adversity and continue toward an uncertain future. Boyadjiev extends this concept into “resilience +,” proposing that survival is not simply a return to an original condition but the capacity to adapt and develop new forms of life.
Yet the venue introduces a question the theme cannot entirely resolve: what happens to it when the building in which it is staged remains inseparable from the political power that gives its history contemporary significance?
The former consulate cannot be a neutral space. Nor can its transformation into an exhibition venue make it one. BUNA’s achievement lies in opening a building previously inaccessible to most of Varna’s residents. Its challenge is that opening the doors can come to stand in for confronting what those doors once protected.
The Limits of Endurance
Boyadjiev’s concept of inat draws on parallels between Balkan and North American Indigenous communities. It emerges through cultural hybridity, inherited knowledge, and the ability to persist within imposed systems. Traditions are neither perfectly preserved nor entirely erased; they change through contact, resistance, and appropriation.
Boyadjiev traces the theme to an experience in Santa Fe in 2008, describing an interest that has “bothered” him for nearly two decades. His thinking draws connections between Pueblo communities and Balkan traditions, including the visual and spiritual similarities he perceives between Kachina figures and Bulgarian kukeri, as well as shared folk medicine across distinct cultural contexts. This approach is grounded in lived encounters rather than an exclusively academic framework. Recounting how an Apache man was surprised that Boyadjiev knew a remedy for a burned finger that he had learned from his grandmother, the curator describes cultural knowledge as something that can cross boundaries without its practitioners necessarily knowing its origins elsewhere.
This framework rightly refuses to equate survival with stasis. But the experience of communities subjected to colonization and historical dispossession is not interchangeable with the transformation of a former diplomatic property. To bring these histories together requires more than placing them under a common heading. It requires asking who has been forced to endure, who has exercised power, and what accountability becomes possible after a political order changes.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine makes this distinction especially urgent. The consulate’s closure is a continuing consequence of a war that has reshaped European political relationships. Inat cannot only describe how people recover from catastrophe; it must also ask how cultural institutions respond to the forces that produce it.
The parallels Boyadjiev draws are valuable, yet the idea is capacious enough to accommodate almost any story of adaptation. The connections within the exhibition should reveal the particular conditions under which survival becomes necessary, rather than folding every story into the same expansive narrative.
As a title, “Native Resolution” suggests an arrival at clarity or a settled outcome, while inat carries a more resistant quality, a refusal to yield. The Bulgarian term holds a productive friction that the English word “resolution” risks smoothing over. The exhibition teeters between defiance and the reassuring promise of reconciliation, a distinction that matters in a building whose history remains politically unresolved.
Between the Official and the Intimate
Savakov’s building was made to be inhabited. Its ground floor held a banquet and concert hall, the consul general’s office, and the visa counters; upstairs, diplomats’ apartments and a library extended the institution into domestic life, while bunkers lay beneath its roughly 1,000 square meters.
The consulate was a place where hospitality and exclusion operated side by side: receptions staged a managed image of international friendship, while the visa counters decided who could cross borders. As Boyadjiev observes, its fenced perimeter still produces an “unfriendly feeling.”
The exhibition makes this contradiction tangible by inviting visitors into spaces they once knew only from the outside. The visa department retains its administrative remnants, and in the abandoned apartments ordinary objects take on the status of historical artifacts. This is among the exhibition’s strongest curatorial instincts, and it raises a fair question: does the same sensitivity extend to the political conditions that made the building what it was?
What Was Kept and What Was Removed
The choice to retain the visa signage and payment windows while removing the security system that once controlled entry into the visa department deserves closer attention. Removing those controls lets the building function as a public cultural space, an understandable priority, but it preserves the appearance of bureaucracy while softening the embodied experience of being subjected to it. Visitors’ freedom to circulate, produced by a curatorial decision, changes the building’s political legibility.
The same tension runs through the abandoned interiors: a basement sauna still stocked with oak branches and a sealed metal door said to hide old encryption equipment. Such remnants reveal the specificity of former lives, though they risk becoming picturesque signs of abandonment.
Boyadjiev’s desire to show visitors that there is “nothing really threatening” inside the building is understandable, and generous. Opening it lets residents encounter its actual spaces rather than speculate about them, though demystification is not quite the same as reckoning. The exhibition could hold friendliness and discomfort together more deliberately, letting visitors enter freely while still sensing the unresolved weight of the building’s past.
Works in the Rooms
The exhibition brings together artists working across disciplines, and its strength lies in the range of approaches through which historical memory and cultural transmission are explored. That range is evident from the threshold.
Rirkrit Tiravanija greets visitors the moment they step inside. On a temporary wall in the entrance hall, beneath the globe chandeliers, Say Yes to Everything (2026) is built from pages of Bulgarian dailies such as 24 Chasa and Telegraf, crossword grids included, pasted edge to edge, with three words painted across them by hand in tall black letters and doubled in the polished stone floor. Made for Varna, the work takes its title from Tiravanija’s recent solo exhibition at STPI in Singapore, where the phrase named his practice of entering situations without a fixed outcome. Here it becomes a gentle provocation. Inat is, at heart, the art of saying no, and the consulate was a building whose counters said no for a living. Set against the daily noise of the city’s press, the work asks visitors to test their own “resilience +” against the news, and proposes openness as its own form of stubbornness.
Other works treat the consulate’s rooms not as a backdrop but as material, and Dimitar Solakov’s A Few Degrees From Release (2023) does so with almost nothing. In a corridor paneled in wood veneer, a plain door stands closed beside a light switch. For long stretches, nothing happens. Then, without warning, a solenoid-driven church-bell hammer strikes the door from behind, and the bang fills the corridor. In a building where a sealed metal door still guards equipment no visitor may see, Solakov offers a door that will not open and will not stay quiet. Where the curators open doors, Solakov keeps one shut and lets what lies behind it announce itself. The bell hammer, borrowed from an instrument that calls, warns, and mourns, makes the hidden audible without making it visible.
Martian Tabakov takes the bathroom. In one of the diplomats’ apartments, above a bathtub, toilet, and bidet left in place, dozens of white opal-glass globes, the same kind that hang from the reception-hall chandeliers, cover a plywood panel, each cut with a single round opening. They look like eyes. Funny and unnerving at once, the work carries the apparatus of official display into the one room meant for privacy and lets it stare back.
In the former visa section, Mila Panić hangs a sentence in blue neon across a travertine wall: “While other kids played with Legos, I played with legbones.” The handwriting is loose, almost childish, and the pun lands before its meaning does. Beside it, a black-and-white portrait shows a young woman facing the camera against a plain ground, blood running from her mouth onto a white collar. The format is that of a document photograph, the frontal image every applicant once submitted at these counters, and where the neon’s last letters meet the print, its blue light falls across her face. Neon belongs to shopfronts and advertising; here it announces a childhood shaped by violence in the language of a sales pitch, while the portrait insists on the body that carried it. In rooms where identity was verified and admission granted or refused, the work asks what a document photograph can never record.
Overhead in the banquet hall, Pavel Braila suspends a black-ground carpet dense with red roses, tilted beneath the acoustic pyramids and above the empty stage. It is the kind of carpet that once hung on living-room walls from Moldova to Bulgaria, now lifted into the hall of state receptions, neither displayed nor discarded.
Listen closely to Antoni Rayzhekov’s The Evasive Choir (2021), and no one says anything. Thirty tin cans, their lids peeled back to reveal small speakers, sit on chrome microphone stands in a room still partitioned by a white lattice grille, their black cables pooling across the parquet. The recordings come from interviews with Bulgarian political and public figures since 1989, processed until the words disappear and only sighs, hesitations, and exclamations remain, stretched into a choir. The stands recall a press scrum; the cans recall the tin-can telephones of childhood. In a building organized around official speech, the work becomes a quiet reflection on what can be heard, filtered, or muted under authority.
Live work extended the exhibition beyond its installations, with performances by Valentina Traïanova and Ivana Ivković, whose The Base of Trust was also among the finalists for the Balkan Contemporary Art Prize.
The Question of Russia
The most direct challenge to the venue’s Russian association appears in Оттепель (The Thaw) by Brad Downey and Igor Ponosov. In a room lined with empty bookshelves, flags on wooden poles lean out from the bare shelves: the Stars and Stripes spliced with the Russian tricolor, the same stars set over Bulgaria’s white, green, and red, a coiled snake beneath a Soviet red star. The hybrids bring the question of Russia into the visual field and prevent the former consulate from functioning merely as an atmospheric backdrop. Yet the work was made in 2016, as a diary of friendship filled with private jokes, and the thaw it imagined has since frozen over. Planted in a building emptied by the war in Ukraine, its optimism reads less as a challenge than as an elegy, a shift that comes from the venue rather than the work itself.
Mladen Miljanović’s The Final Battle (2025) addresses war head-on, and its wall text names the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East. The film documents four castings for an imaginary war movie, whose applicants are veterans, civilian victims, disabled people, and others traumatized by conflict. It is screened on a portable tripod screen in one of the upstairs apartments, where a sofa and wooden chairs remain. On screen, a woman in a white dress stands on a stone wall above green hills, tearing at her hair and screaming; later, a figure lies on the ground beside a small white marker. The label says the participants were “seduced” into taking part, a word worth pausing over. The film asks viewers to watch real trauma performed for a fictional camera, from a diplomat’s living room, and it is among the works that most fully let the building’s comfort sit uneasily beside the violence of the present.
Nor must every artist address Russia explicitly. Cannupa Hanska Luger’s SURVIVA: A Future Ancestral Field Guide reworks FM 21-76, the U.S. Army survival manual of October 1957, its stenciled cover overtaken by red overprinting and handwritten notes such as “Natives Might Help.” In the accompanying video, Luger, his face painted red, climbs a stepladder in a public lobby and writes across an enlarged page, “These stories are told and retold and limited to linear concepts of time, We Survive You...” The manual treated Indigenous knowledge as a resource for soldiers stranded in enemy territory; Luger makes that knowledge the author. In Varna, “We Survive You” is harder to address, since the enemy territory imagined by a Cold War Pentagon manual included Bulgaria itself.
Rose B. Simpson, of Santa Clara Pueblo (Khaʼpʼo Owingeh) in New Mexico, extends the exhibition’s Indigenous strand with To Guest (2025), a video that arrived from the Biennale of Sydney. Its title alone sits pointedly against the territorial assumptions embedded in diplomatic architecture.
Taken as a whole, the exhibition is at its most confident in the rooms themselves. Solakov, Tabakov, Panić, and Braila answer the architecture with real intelligence, while Rayzhekov’s muted politicians and Luger’s rewritten Cold War manual touch the region’s political history more obliquely. Only Downey and Ponosov’s flags and Miljanović’s film, however, address Russia and its war directly. A little more of that directness would have let the art, rather than the building alone, carry the weight of the place’s history.
What Inat Requires
Native Resolution / Вроден ИНАТ gives its theme material and spatial form: in leftover objects, inherited knowledge, abandoned rooms, and an institution’s chance at a new public life.
Opening its doors does not release the former Russian consulate from its past, any more than that past can be contained by the signage left on its walls. The removal of the security system, the preservation of bureaucratic remnants, and the invitation to wander through once-private spaces are curatorial acts with political consequences. Their significance lies as much in what they leave unspoken as in what they reveal.
The exhibition and work undertaken here by Luchezar Boyadjiev and Boyana Dzhikova offer a generous and valuable beginning. It returns a closed building to public life, demonstrates its cultural potential, and establishes a framework through which its next chapter might be imagined. The opportunity now is to build on that opening rather than treat it as a conclusion.
Perhaps this is where inat finds its most convincing expression. Not only in the hope that a difficult space can become friendly, but in the stubborn commitment to work through its contradictions. A building can change its purpose without changing its history. Art can open a door without pretending that the threshold was ever neutral. Resilience, if it is to mean more than survival, must include the capacity to confront what has survived with us. —Charles Moore
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