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Æther Sofia/Haga are two sibling independent art spaces in the heart of Sofia (BG) and The Hague (NL). 

Æther Sofia, founded in spring 2016 and run by Voin de Voin, creates with a program of activities and exhibitions a possibility for experimentation and generates critical feedback on the contemporary obscurities of living through art, science, politics and activism.

With its activities it wishes to engage and bridge the local and international art scene in different propositions and activation of collective rituals and thinking. It asks to strengthen the dialogue between artists and its publics, shaping new ideas about art, history and the present states of both beings and affairs.

Æther Haga is initiated and curated by artists Marie Civikov and Voin de Voin and opened her doors for the very first time 5 October 2018.

In The Hague (Haga / Xaгa) it ocasionally presents a selection related to Æther Sofia's program in Bulgaria and will unfold proposals of what intersects along the East/West trajectory based on the already started dialogues at the eastern point. Within this the project strives to make a more physical bond between the continental linear directions, its psycho-geographic potentiality and a bridge less unstable, built upon sharing, discussion and exchange. It is seeking to expose links and affects of lifetime traces of a generation lived under different conditions, this time coming together in quest to confide a new state of value and content through art and innovative practices.

Would you like to support Æther to continue its activities and help building a community that connects people and environment through art in the broadest sense of it? Besides your presence, all financial support helps. You can contribute by becoming a 'Patron'. Read all about it here.

 

An overview of our past events and projects can be found under the tabs above.

Æther loves to engage in dialogue with its surroundings and regularly invites them to join in. Latest news + archive of announcements below: ▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼

 

SAW - Sofia Art Week - OPEN CALL

SAW-SOFIA ART WEEK 5

OPEN CALL 2022

*RE-SPIRIT TRANS-SPIRIT*

WÆ are excited to bring our open call for the 5th edition of Sofia Art Week, which will happen in two parts this year - Sofia in October and Varna in November.

Please read and spread the call!

Deadline for proposals: September 1st,  2022. Submit or contact us at: Aetherartsofia@gmail.com

Many thanks to Curating in Context team for the inspiration.

The Art Week will be realised with the financial support of The Singer-Zahariev Foundation

Graphic design: Victoria Kieffer

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School of Kindness - OPEN CALL

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RÆcap & Æhead

Æther Haga reflects on her short but turbulent existence and makes a prediction for the future.

Shown on 24 September 2021, Hoogtij#66, The Hague at Æther Haga

Æther Haga presents: Capitalizing on my Love for You by Sofia Dimova

 

For the online edition of Hoogtij #64Sofia Dimova captured an impression of her solo exhibition, 'Capitalizing on my Love for You', which was on view at Æther Sofia in February, with a soundscape by Sekaìology (Martijn de Geele).

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Capitalizing on my Love for You by Sofia Dimova at Æther Sofia

Mitch Brezounek

How to Become the Best Artist in the World 

As part of the online edition of Hoogtij#63,
Æther Haga presents How to Become the Best Artist in the World by Mitch Brezounek

Tune in Friday November 27 from 19:00 at Hoogtij.net

‘How to Become the Best Artist in the World’ shows how Doug, an ageing painter, and his son create a video course on VHS tape with tips on how to become the best artist in the world. In 10 chapters, clichés of the artist’s existence are enlarged, including the currently much debated principle of the “bad boy image” and reducing the importance of women in this to their outward appearance.

It is the enlargements and simplifications of behaviours in the film that make you laugh, while at the same time pointing out that these absurdities are often not so far removed from the sad reality, in which it often turns out that a big mouth and playing the alpha male can take you far into this world.

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Swan Song

We are happy to share with you our OPEN CALL for SAW- Sofia Art Week 2020 "SWAN SONG".

 

We are looking for performative acts and speeches of the final judgement today. Swan Song urges you to regain your voice — because silence is complicity. From 19 — 26 September, we offer an open platform that will briefly settle down at different locations in Sofia, reanimating the Speakers’ Corner for your personal politics. In Bulgaria today we are faced with the discriminative context where the public protests are not met with political reward. A voice is discriminated when it is not heard. We pose the question: how effective is the public protest? Has it become anachronistic, exhausted? What is the new way of protesting?
Please download the pdf below for the details.

SAW edition 3 is realised by Æther Sofia and Migrating Voices, curated by Voin de Voin and Lisette Smits

For inquiries and how to participate please send an email to: aetherartsofia@gmail.com. We need to receive your proposal not later than September 1, 2020.

RAD.OST - OPEN CALL FOR BULGARIA BASED ARTISTS

Residency period 1 sept- 1 dec. 2020
Location- ASS <Akademie Schloss Solitude>, Stuttgart

**Open Call closes July 5**

RAD.OST, is a newly established residency as part of the Eastern European Network. Three independent art spaces
in Sofia, Bulgaria: Æther, Radar Sofia, and Swimming Pool, invite you to live and work for three months in "the saddest place in the world", according to The Economist, as part of
a collaboration with Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, and with the kind support of Goethe- Institut Bulgaria.
Download the pdf for details about the cooperation, aims, deadlines and requirements.

Logo design: Victoria Kieffer

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✧✧✧ Panacea ✧✧✧ Victoria Kieffer

As part of the online edition of Hoogtij#61,
Æther Haga presents PANACEA by Victoria Kieffer.

Tune in Friday May 29 from 19:00 at https://www.hoogtij.net/en/61online-edition/

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On the occasion of our Solitude Akademie fellowship awarded, together with Victoria Kieffer, Æther is creating a new self published edition of Panacea.
If you feel related to our call, please send us your reflections before March 22, by email to: Aetherartsofia@gmail.com

**Open call closed**

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Open call – Wild Wild Æst

**closed February 14 2020**

For our upcoming project ‘Wild Wild Æst' that will take place on March 6 at Æther Haga in The Hague, we are looking for submissions of short video works with a vision on the current era of what we call "Eastern Europe". Maybe you live on that "Eastern side", or you've never been there, but your image consists of a collection of possible prejudices that you want to confess and share. We’d love to receive contributions with a diverse spectrum of points of view with a maximum length of two minutes.

 

Psycho-geography more than ever plays part in the way we perceive the ever-rolling shift of the con tempo. We are looking for explorations of both urban environments that emphasizes playfulness and "drifting" inner wishes and visions, revolutionary groups fictions, Marxist and anarchist theory retold, as well as by the attitudes and methods of Dadaists and Surrealists applied nowadays. Psycho-geography as a new guide tool for orientation in geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals has also been defined as "a total dissolution of boundaries between art and life". A whole toy box full of playful, inventive strategies for exploring cities, places, mindsets, traditions; just about anything that takes pedestrians off their predictable paths and jolts them into a new awareness of the landscape.

 

Send your video with wetransfer to: aetherartsofia@gmail.com

Maximum length: 2 minutes

Format: mp4 / MOV / AVI

Deadline: February 14

 

Æther is a self-supporting artist-run platform and what we have to offer for this open call is a stage on the 6th of March as part of the 60th edition of Hoogtij, The Cultural Tour in The Hague.

 

We’re very much looking forward to your submission!

OPEN CALL- SOFIA ART WEEK 2019

***Open call is closed***

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On the behalf of Sofia Art Week- Æ and Voin de Voin invite you to join a collective ritual of reflections in the month of July, starting the 15th lasting until the 22th of 2019.
 

The Open Call is addressed to all Art practitioners from the Contemporary Art field, including Institutional bodies, Art initiatives, Individual artists, freelance curators, theoreticians and speakers.
We are looking for proposals to participate in/with:

 

-a group exhibition
-solo initiatives
-curators propositions
-speakers


The current mind set proposition focuses on the topic: Great, But Late?
-A Battlefield of Dialectics Between Form and Sensitivity.

Arriving at the present 2019

Logo design: Svetlana Mircheva

 

For this second edition we are proposing Sofia City to centralize the magnitude of voices and visions and establish the city as an Epicenter of art commodities, exhibitions, events, discussions and before all a meeting point for art practitioners to come together from different places in Europe and outside, and deliver a perspective on current political, social and artistic reproaches and movements emerging or already « flourishing » our world today.
Through line of affinities and moments of crisis, we invite cultural practitioners, theorists and artists to paradoxically sum up with a puzzle that might create sites of unpredictability. To perhaps question the controversial nature of form itself.
In times of over-determined living (war zones, hidden and overtly banal political agendas, spiritual confusion and recourse to post-apocalyptic notions like fatalistic closure on the political question of global warming), freedom appears to be a precarious matter, in a perhaps new way we are barred from articulating.
Political agency itself is caught in a conundrum: What is it, if not an idea and yet controlled by outside forces ?... Is it an individual horizon and in what way does it call for a group action ?
This precarious freedom of the contemporary era, becomes an embodied way of perceiving reality, leaving the individual in a state of stasis, virtual limbo, anticipating a change, but rather creating a negative liminal space both in mental and physical spheres. The play and power of the past century and into the current social, economic and geo-political reality, have created a shift in the mind of the citizens, doubtless making the mark more visible of the split worlds – the privileged and the suffering.
The face of this era, has displayed itself with a new one the one of reoccurring past, unwanted and yet producing possible scenarios for society, that is trapped in totalitarian frames and under new age unspoken slavery.

The instability of the course of events are a sign of psycho- geographical displacement (technology, media, information), and plays an important part in the way we see the method of working in this edition of the SAW.
SAW – past tense of « seeing », « to see ».
SAW – a saw is a tool consisting of a tough blade, wire, or chain with a hard toothed edge. It is used to cut through material, very often wood though sometimes metal or stone. The cut is made by placing the toothed edge against the material and moving it forcefully forth and less forcefully back or continuously forward.
Combining the meaning of this abbreviation, almost like in a mathematic equation we arrive to this proposal – what do we need to witness in order to arrive or relate to the question of the Act...?
What do we need to lose/chop/cut/extract, in order to see through, and truly begin.
The dialectics between seeing and believing take on a new meaning for us to establish a common ground of discussion on the topic of form and sensitivity.
Which is the valid truth, the one that someone tells you, or the one that you experience by doing. We are looking for a new common language, which which we can build a foundation of stability in an unstable setting.
A wish to state not a phobic sensation of passivity and immobility, but rather to urge the desire of encounter and communicate to truly enter and also find a path to exit the void, physicalized in art’s expanded studio.
To perhaps lose the binds of the infinite whip-appropriation of our modern nightmare.
What is beyond, to see through?

 

PLEASE SEND YOUR PROPOSALS NOT LATER THAN
25 MARCH 2019 TO:
Aetherartsofia@gmail.com
Don't hesitate to contact us for any further inquiries.
We are looking forwards to receive your written ideas.

***Open call is closed***

For our first self published edition BECOMING THE OTHER (self-guide), we are opening a reflecting channel on the issue and subtopics on the call sheet.
Please send your texts, images, drawings, thoughts to:
aetherartsofia@gmail.com
before 5/09/2018
P.S. The issue will be launched in Stuttgart in Nov. 2018 as part of Soft Power Palace at Kunstgebäude Stuttgart

 

Feel free to spread the word!
 

Æ

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