Brieftopia names a temporary historical configuration in which an imagined possibility acquires enough material and social form to become tangible, yet remains incomplete.
A Brieftopia may take shape through practices, relationships, images, institutions or infrastructures. It is neither utopia, nostalgia nor prediction, and it does not guarantee emancipation. Its possibilities may contain exclusions, contradictions and dangers. What matters is that another future was not only imagined: it had begun to enter collective life before it was interrupted.
Brieftopia
Brieftopia is a long-term artistic, curatorial and pedagogical platform initiated and directed equally by Behzad Khosravi Noori and Snejana Krasteva. It develops Brieftopia through exhibitions, films, publications, conversations, archival activation and situated forms of collective inquiry.
Brieftopia is not attached to a single institution or event. It works through temporary collaborations and sustained relationships, allowing each activity to respond to its location while contributing to a developing body of research. Rather than producing a fixed institutional identity, it creates conditions in which incomplete histories and interrupted possibilities can be studied, tested and made publicly perceptible.
Co-founders and co-directors
Behzad Khosravi Noori and Snejana Krasteva share artistic, curatorial, strategic and editorial responsibility for the Brieftopia Foundry equally.
Advisory board
The Foundry is supported by an international advisory board whose members bring perspectives from artistic research, curatorial practice, political theory, postcolonial studies, film and institutional work. The board provides critical scrutiny at key stages, identifying conceptual limitations, historical assumptions, ethical risks and possible exclusions. It advises the Foundry without directing its daily activities or controlling individual projects.
- Irina Sandomirskaja
- Francisco Carballo
- Boris Buden
- Maria Lind
- Edgar Schmitz
- Magnus Bärtås
- Dennis Sobh
- Michael Dutton
- Snejanka Mihaylova
Incomplete futurity
Brieftopia begins from incomplete futurity: the condition of a possible future that became partially actual but did not consolidate into a stable historical order. Its remains may survive as objects, languages, images, institutions, collective practices or memories. These traces do not prove that an unrealised future would have succeeded. They allow us to examine what became thinkable and practicable before interruption.
The projcet approaches incompleteness as both a historical condition and a working method. It resists turning interrupted possibilities into heroic narratives or recovered truths. Artistic speculation can open relations that historical evidence alone cannot complete, but speculation must remain visibly distinct from historical assertion.
Art Between Crisis and Imagination
Brieftopia: Art Between Crisis and Imagination, presented at the Museum of Humour and Satire in Gabrovo from 21 March to 30 June 2026, was the first transnational laboratory developed toward the 26th Gabrovo Biennale of Humour and Satire in Art.
The exhibition brought together Voin de Voin, Nevena Ekimova, Armando Lulaj, Ivan Moudov, Maria Nalbantova, Behzad Khosravi Noori, Boryana Petkova, Antoni Rayzhekov, Lexi Fleur and Luka Cvetković. Their works approached crisis not only as rupture or emergency, but as a condition in which imagination, humour, fabulation and resistance may produce fragile openings toward other futures.
Brieftopia, Three or More Fools, commissioned by the Museum of Humour and Satire and curated by Snejana Krasteva, was developed for this exhibition.
Archives of Futurity
23–24 May 2026
Library Building, Technical University of Gabrovo
Archives of Futurity is a transdisciplinary symposium developed in relation to the exhibition and the long-term work of the Brieftopia Foundry. Through lectures, screenings and dialogue, it asks how archives may hold traces of interrupted futures without monumentalising them or converting them into evidence of inevitable progress.
The symposium is moderated by Snejana Krasteva and Behzad K. Noori. Speakers are Behzad K. Noori, Boris Buden, Edgar Schmitz, Magnus Bärtås, Maria Lind, Michael Dutton and Snejanka Mihaylova. Together, the exhibition and symposium establish Gabrovo as a site for testing the relationship between hope and hopelessness, historical incompleteness, political imagination and collective practice.
Toward the 26th Gabrovo Biennale
The 2029 Gabrovo Biennale is being developed as a long-term process rather than a single exhibition event. Brieftopia functions here as a curatorial ethic and working method. It shifts the Biennale from short-term presentation toward sustained local, regional and transnational engagement, treating temporality as a methodological resource.
The programme begins from Gabrovo’s histories of labour, humour, satire and institutional memory. It situates these histories in relation to Balkan and Eastern European transformations while developing connections with artistic and institutional practices in the Global South and other peripheral contexts. These scales are not hierarchical. They operate as overlapping zones in which collaborations can emerge, change and sometimes dissolve while leaving consequential traces.
The process combines artistic research, exhibition-making, pedagogy, archival work, publication and public conversation. It accepts experimentation, incompleteness and failure as productive conditions, while resisting the idea that every collaboration must become permanent or culminate in a finished institutional statement.
The Social Life of the Archive
The Social Life of the Archive activates the Museum of Humour and Satire’s collection, developed since 1973, as a field of social and historical relations rather than a fixed repository. A sequence of focused exhibitions will bring individual artists and archival materials into new contexts inside the museum and throughout the city.
Young curators, schools and local institutions will participate in selecting, interpreting and publicly presenting material. Exhibitions, off-site interventions, talks, screenings, workshops and publications will allow the archive to circulate through Gabrovo. Pedagogy is therefore not an accompanying activity but one of the methods through which the archive acquires a renewed social life.
Brieftopia in Dialogue
Brieftopia in Dialogue is a long-term video archive that documents interpretations of Brieftopia while participating in the concept’s continuing construction. Conversations with artists, scholars and practitioners address historical incompleteness, futurity, political imagination, collective memory, colonial temporality, humour and satire, and the archive as a site of power.
The series does not ask contributors to confirm the concept. Differing and conflicting accounts help identify what Brieftopia names, what it excludes and where it may fail. The archive began with a conversation with Irina Sandomirskaja in Stockholm concerning language, exile and what happens to collective futurity when the communities carrying it are displaced, dispersed or silenced.
Brieftopia in Text
Publication is treated as a continuous practice rather than a final record produced after the Biennale. Reflective essays, creative and critical writing, an evolving ontology, archival texts and reactivated museum publications will accompany the programme as it develops.
Working with the museum library, Brieftopia in Text connects dissemination, institutional memory and critical reflection. Writing workshops and publications allow each stage of the process to remain available for reinterpretation while gradually forming a coherent publication series.
A genealogy of the concept
Brieftopia emerges from an artistic-research trajectory concerned with hyper-politics, microhistory, Contemporary Ar(t)chaeology and necromancy. These ideas are related, but they do not describe the same operation.
Hyper-politics and microhistory
Three or Four Ir/relevant Stories: Art and Hyper-Politics (2021) examines a condition of political claustrophobia in which singular lives, histories and futures are absorbed into dominant antagonisms. Hyper-politics names this enclosure. Brieftopia asks which alternative possibilities nevertheless acquired sufficient social or material form to become historical within it. Microhistory changes the scale of attention, remaining close to minor lives, displaced objects and marginal narratives without treating them as illustrations of an already settled history.
Contemporary Ar(t)chaeology and necromancy
Contemporary Ar(t)chaeology approaches remains not as neutral evidence, but as matter whose historical relations can be tested and recontextualised in the present. The term was developed editorially in VIS, Issue 12: Contemporary Ar(t)chaeology (2024), co-edited by Behzad Khosravi Noori and Magnus Bärtås.
Necromancy is a speculative artistic-research method used at evidentiary thresholds, where surviving traces cannot securely determine what they mean. It makes historical remains operative without claiming to reconstruct the past or authorise the dead to speak. It has been developed through works including Brioni: A Necromantic Theatre and On Hospitality.
Related projects and editorial work
The One Who Hopes, developed by Behzad Khosravi Noori with Magnus Bärtås and Snejana Krasteva, follows Esperanto through Iran, Poland and Japan. It asks what happens when a language designed to cross borders acquires different political, religious and social lives, and what remains when its promised future becomes historically difficult to perceive.
The School of Imagination, founded in Ibrahim Hyderi, Karachi, in 2022, develops collective pedagogical and material practices with the fishing community. Its work asks how alternative futures can be made through situated learning, shared labour and collective ownership.
VIS, Issue 13: Brieftopia (2025) gathered six peer-reviewed artistic research expositions around interrupted possibility, incomplete futurity and the material traces of alternatives. The issue positioned Brieftopia as a question to be tested through distinct artistic practices rather than as a universal explanatory category.
Posters and visual archive
The visual archive gathers posters, invitations, programmes and graphic material produced through Brieftopia activities. These materials document how the platform has been communicated and transformed through different formats and contexts.
Download the bilingual poster for Brieftopia: Art Between Crisis and Imagination (PDF)
This page will continue to gather visual material, texts, conversations, documentation and critical responses as the Brieftopia Foundry develops.
