Lignes de désir

Punta Gallery / 6.02.2026 – 7.03.2026

The Lignes de désir project was realised in 2025 inside the empty shops in the historical city centre of Digne-les-Bains, France. Within the walls of seven shops, eight Bulgarian artists (and one French), invited by the Cairn Art Centre, displayed their site-specific works – a result of three years of artistic research. By experimenting with these spaces for commerce, their changing content and the way these changes reflect time – its needs, desires and tensions – the exhibition offers a speculative interpretation of the stories of the empty shops, bringing together past and present, real and imaginary. The project considers the shops and their displays as mechanisms for creating imagination, as spaces related to a town’s collective dreaming. In February 2026, the exhibition will be shown at the Women’s Market in Sofia at the PUNTA and Cable Depot galleries, as well as shops and cafés on Stefan Stambolov Blvd. It aims to discover points of contact between the contexts of the Women’s Market and the mountain town of Digne, while addressing the broader subject of the construction of our inner worlds through the market of desire, the pleasures of its consumption, but also the dangers this entails. *** The exhibition is financed through the “Market of Desire: Creating and exhibiting Bulgarian cultural production at the Cairn Art Centre (Digne-les-Bains) and PUNTA Gallery (Sofia)” project, funded under contract № BG-RRP-11.020-0224-C01 from 01.08.2025, “Two-session grant scheme “Creation of Bulgarian productions and co-productions in the CCI sector and their promotion on the European and international art markets”. The exhibition is made possible with the kind assistance of the Vazrazhdane District and Mayor Stanislav Iliev.