Iliyana Nedkova: the Balkan Answer

The word ‘grace’ was made for people like Iliyana Nedkova. The 35-year old Bulgarian curator exudes a quiet charm and confidence which complements her general air of intellectual chic. As I work my way through her official titles, keen to get them all right, she is puzzling over a way to sum them up modestly. She is Curator in Residence, New Media Scotland; Associate Curator, Stills Gallery; Honorary Cultural Attaché at the Consulate of the Republic of Bulgaria in Scotland; and to cut a long story short, she is also advisor, assessor and consultant to various cultural bodies including the Scottish Arts Council and the International Symposium of Electronic Art. And she only got here two years ago.

We are sitting in a small black room downstairs at Stills Gallery. It has recently been decked out as a mini-cinema, and we are occupying two of the four designer chairs, while Balkan films dance soundlessly on the back wall. This ScreenLab is one of Nedkova’s many initiatives since joining Stills in spring, and is part of the New Europe And The Balkans season for which she is responsible.

“Scotland is very proud of its culture,” Nedkova explains. “It’s very proud of its nationhood, but it’s also quite open to acknowledging other people’s achievements and I thought this could be the perfect setting for talking about foreign cultures. We’re focussing on those countries that are not necessarily joining the EU this year but will have to perform very well for the next three or four years and wait until January 2007, as is the case with Romania and Bulgaria.”

“The entire show’s undercurrent,” she continues, “is about our turbulent times, and the current ‘war on terror’ type of mentality. It’s really not specific to a particular region although it comments on some of the stereotypes of the Balkan nature and the nature of the relationships within the region. It is really more universal in its message.”

Nedkova has brought together artists and filmmakers from Bulgaria, Croatia, Romania and Serbia in a photographic exhibition and in a series of weekend special events which are open to the public; next Sunday (February 8), sees the launch of the first ever retrospective of Croatian video art, Frame By Frame, and a talk from one of its featured artists, Lala Rascic.

During the process of pulling all of these people and events together, Nedkova found herself a new role. “I stumbled upon the newly established Bulgarian consulate, based in Dundee,” she says, “and my appointment came about organically from a dialogue with the Honorary Consul, Professor Nikolai Zhelev, as to how we can make an impact on contemporary Scotland from a Bulgarian perspective. And since we can only do it very modestly, we decided I could take the position of the Honorary Cultural Attaché, and continue these efforts throughout this season at Stills, as well as trying to establish a cultural policy and an agency for Scotland that will promote and facilitate these kind of events.”

Nedkova knows that her strengths as a networker will be vital in this new position, if she is to succeed in creating something out of nothing – or at least out of very little. ‘I’ve been following closely the activities of the giant cultural institutes of this world,” she explains, “like the Institut Francais, the Danish Cultural Institute, and the Goethe Institute. Although we aspire to be as influential, we will never achieve this scope of activities and this level of funding, and so we’re looking at very creative ways of partnering with local institutions that will take an active interest in what we do, and what cultural professionals in Bulgaria do. It will never be the task of a cultural attaché to devise a diverse programme of activities that will reach out to every possible corner of this country; it’s really a matter of both sides coming together to make a project happen.”

Meanwhile, Nedkova continues to make projects happen through New Media Scotland (the organisation which first brought her to Scotland) and through Stills Gallery, as well as guest curating in her native Bulgaria. I ask her why she left a country which she clearly loves very much. “I was told recently,” she laughs, “that Bulgarians rarely declare that they have ever left the country, and that’s certainly the case with me - I’ve never felt that I’ve ever really left!”

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 01.02.04