“Black Market” is, first and foremost, a response to the territory in which it takes shape. Located in the heart of Sofia’s Women’s Market, a crossroads where various forms of trade, exchange, and transaction unfold, Punta Gallery is embedded within a social and cultural fabric woven around a multitude of open-air stalls. This specific context, along with the many stories that emerge from it—gathered over the course of several stays between the seaside city of Varna and the winding streets of Sofia’s old town—became the starting point for a reflection on the informal economy, the circulation of goods and information, and the conditions that give rise to these alternative flows.
While the black market is, by its very nature, the stuff of fantasy—owing both to its opaque mechanisms and its clandestine character—it is above all the product of an economy that state authorities are unable to quantify, regulate, or even contain. Escaping the regulatory and fiscal restrictions imposed by governing powers, it constitutes a network of underground flows that free themselves from all forms of control and persist within a space of their own: a porous zone between illegality and fiction. Yet any economy deemed “informal” exists only in relation to an established and institutionalized framework, against which strategies of circumvention are developed. In this sense, these parallel currents are not external to the ultra-capitalist system; rather, they are an integral part of it and actively sustain it. Referring to this “black” or “hidden” economy, “Black Market” seeks more broadly to explore all forms of flows that circulate, swarm, and spread endemically across borders and outside official channels.
The exhibition seeks to enter the gap between fantasy and reality in order to examine the modes of existence of various underground networks and the narrative systems they generate. Whether they take the form of marginal or widely disseminated currents of thought—conspiracy theories and supernatural stories that eventually take shape in reality—or of counterfeit goods, the tangible and intangible commodities at stake here develop their own alternative channels of circulation. Smuggling, the darknet, illegal or protected social networks: all belong to a constellation of parallel systems driven by a shared impulse to reject liberal norms. Within this exhibition, the black market responds to a particular geopolitical and economic context—one specific to Bulgaria, marked by its recent entry into the Schengen Area and the resulting challenges of economic and legal regulation—while also functioning as a speculative framework, activated and complicated by the participating artists.
Engaging with these questions, Gaia Vincensini’s work multiplies enigmatic symbols and clues in order to decode some of the mechanisms in the production of material and immaterial value systems. Playing on the fantasies that fuel a market economy often based on aggressive marketing, she draws on a visual language that feeds this fascination: logos of all kinds, clocks, keys, or padlocks serve as the source of a constant back-and-forth between revelation and obscurity. Inspired by the imagery associated with major Swiss banking institutions, she analyzes the mystery surrounding these architectural vaults and their decorum. Between free ports and tax havens, the artist invites us to enter the vault within a world that usually remains inaccessible. Her practice explores the emergence of desire and the power exerted by certain consumer goods. Blending various artisanal skills passed down through generations in her family, Gaia Vincensini’s practice maintains this oscillation between imagery of luxury and counterfeit products.
In a similar endeavour, Aaron Roth’s work explores the visual and cultural phenomena that haunt the aesthetic landscape of the Balkans. In a piece titled Peugeot Boxer (1994–2006) floor mat, the artist works with material from a car floor mat, typically used to conceal goods during border crossings and customs inspections. This camouflage device, combined with other ostentatious symbols—such as a baseball bat bearing the Mercedes logo and bas-reliefs parodying Art Nouveau motifs—suggests a false opulence that may be fleeting. Examining the fascination associated with a world typically presented to us in cinematic fiction, Aaron Roth also narrates the almost inevitable downfall of those for whom money burns a hole in their pockets. This sculpture evocatively conveys the violence inevitably linked to these organized crime-related trafficking operations, which are themselves concealed beneath a lavish facade. Opposite this standing sculpture, a second work—inspired by one of Vice’s first viral videos—reinterprets a photograph attributed to Le Monde showing a suspected nuclear detonator hidden in a car, the authenticity of which remains uncertain. It echoes post-9/11 fears related to nuclear trafficking and “dirty bombs.” By reenacting this uncertain narrative, the artist questions the spread of rumors and other media fantasies.
In her work, created in collaboration with Mexican artist Daniel Urаnga and tattoo artists Yasen Galatinski, Edgar Ugarte and Momchil Genov, Slava George revisits a news story that rocked the Bulgarian media landscape in the summer of 2025. A “domestic” panther that had escaped from a private home had forced residents of the Shumen region into a mandatory lockdown. Widely reported in the press, the event was blown out of proportion until reality gave way to what could be described as a fictional tale reminiscent of a children’s story. In this deliberately kitsch production, reminiscent as much of the tradition of ostentatious animal sculpture designed to demonstrate power as of decorative objects found in lounge restaurants, the artist also questions the representations of authority associated with a form of masculism. The phrases engraved on the surface such as “freedom or death,” evoke certain cultural markers associated with the far right and some mafia networks in Bulgaria as well as in Mexico City. Stemming from the trafficking of exotic animals, the panther becomes a symptom of a societal drift that she chooses to symbolically highlight.
By examining the circulation or distortion of certain information, artist Clarisse Aïn employs an investigative approach within various cultural communities united by beliefs that diverge from what is considered the “official” narrative. Inspired by the informal networks she discovers in certain Telegram groups or in the threads of conversations exchanged on the most obscure forums, the artist seeks to identify alternative systems of thought that most often echo the vicissitudes of current media events. These theories—with varying degrees of conspiracy-theory overtones—nevertheless reflect a desire to articulate and rationalize facts so that they align with a certain vision of reality. Through a series of papers encased in dividers mimicking the appearance of a technocratic bureaucracy, Clarisse Aïn presents the results of her research. While some elements elude our gaze, others are revealed to us without, however, disclosing the full content of these sociologically oriented investigations. Without animosity or judgment, the artist sets out to archive a portion of these constellations of thought that agitate certain groups of internet users—much like the red shoes allegedly worn by Satanist elites gathered around a ritual practice of consuming human blood. By drawing connections between the shoes worn by the power elite, those worn by Dorothy before she entered the world of Oz, and the explicit invitations to discover what lies beyond the looking glass, Clarisse Aïn invites us to explore a marginalized version of the truth.
In a different approach, artist and researcher Nikola Stoyanov seeks to capture a certain atmosphere of latent paranoia that persists in the post-Soviet world. Inspired by a news story from 2023, the installation “The Naphtalene Tapes” refers to the discovery of a painting attributed to Jackson Pollock in a wardrobe in a Bulgarian village. The painting, presumably a gift to Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, is said to have been smuggled into the country via Greece. After resurfacing and undergoing authentication, the painting reportedly vanished once again into the storerooms of the National Gallery in Sofia without any official announcement or scientific report. Nikola Stoyanov’s installation depicts the moment of the canvas’s discovery inside a wardrobe, casting doubt on the very possibility of the scene. Presented as a reenactment, the painting—on which the artist’s potential signature can be discerned—echoes a video on a cathode-ray tube continuously broadcasting a series of contradictory pieces of information: false incident reports, cross-border surveillance footage from where the work may have passed, and photographic archives. Navigating between fantasy and reality to reconstruct a fictional scenario featuring the secret services of the three countries involved, actress Lauren Bacall—who is said to have been given the painting as a birthday gift-, the installation leaves us skeptical about the plausibility of the events. In this video inspired by found footage, he draws on various aesthetic registers—ranging from Eastern European media to the standards of Bulgarian television in the 1990s and the nostalgia associated with them—to further accentuate this sense of a distortion of reality.
“Paranoia is anticipatory,” notes Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You. Through this observation, Sedgwick argues that a paranoid perspective operates by constantly anticipating the worst possible scenario in order to expose, predict, or confirm hidden structures of violence and oppression. The notion of informal flows follows a similar logic: it reveals itself as a spontaneous response to a normalized and repressive system whose mechanisms must be outmaneuvered. The artists brought together in Black Market probe the underlying forces that produce—and are in turn inhabited by—these marginal spaces. Marked by a certain cynicism, their works explore fragments of these parasitic territories, the cracks through which one might slip away from surveillance, offering a response to a form of latent madness in an era where post-truth reigns supreme.
Camille Velluet
The exhibition is realised with financial support of the National Culture Fund, “Creating” program and Institut Français Bulgarie.