THE PAST WITHIN US – Alexander Valchev

Toplocentrala / 28.08.2026 – 27.09.2026

Alexander Valchev is an artist who has repeatedly turned to the images, traces, and remnants of the past. We know his works that engage with art history, as well as others that combine aesthetics and styles, releasing familiar images from their established meanings. In this play with aesthetic frameworks, these images remain in motion, passing through time and reappearing, carrying with them different layers of memory and meaning. The current exhibition, Past Within Us, is a large-scale installation that engages directly with the space and architecture of the Cube Gallery at Toplocentrala Centre for Contemporary Arts. The gallery’s industrial environment is transformed into a fragile, temporary site of memory. Valchev restores the monumentality of the Mausoleum to its actual scale, while constructing it from corrugated cardboard - a light, vulnerable, and impermanent material. The monument reappears as a temporary structure, while cardboard, packaging - the material of circulation, consumption, and constant replacement - also becomes an image of the world we inhabit today. A world of apparent fluidity, in which forms are easily replaced, while meanings and values prove far more enduring. In this project, Valchev addresses the “elephant in the room” of the symbolic gestures of Bulgarian politics after 1989 - the demolition of the Georgi Dimitrov Mausoleum, the building most closely and immediately associated with communist ideology. Its removal was intended to mark a break with an era, yet such a gesture is not in itself a historical resolution, nor does it necessarily imply either a reckoning with the past or the assumption of responsibility for it. What we once were does not disappear along with our monuments. It remains in the fluid space of our collective unconscious, where meanings and values are never fixed, but shift, transform, and sometimes unexpectedly return. Within it accumulate the contradictions, ruptures, and unresolved questions that form part of the very structure of society and of the way it understands itself. The basement of the Mausoleum is still there. Hidden beneath the surface of the city, it gives an almost physical form to this invisible space. Left without the building above it, submerged in darkness, damp, and oblivion, it evokes the layers that can be removed from public view, but cannot be erased from our collective experience. Curator — Vladiya Mihaylova