About

I am Filip Boyadjiev, a visual artist, designer and educator based in Sofia, Bulgaria.

My practice explores how identity is constructed through images, symbols, traditions and the visual systems that surround us. I am interested in the gap between who we believe we are and the images we use to prove it — to ourselves and to others.

I work with familiar cultural symbols, objects and visual languages, often taking them out of their original context and placing them into new, sometimes absurd combinations. Bulgarian tradition, nationalism, masculinity, social status and popular culture become raw materials through which I examine how identities are produced, performed and constantly reconstructed.

My practice is rooted in an interest in visual communication. Coming from graphic design, I am particularly attentive to the way images persuade, how symbols acquire authority, and how repetition can turn an artificial construction into something that appears natural or authentic. In my art, these mechanisms are deliberately exposed, distorted and turned against themselves.

Humor, satire and self-irony are central to my approach. I use them not simply to make fun of the subjects I address, but to create distance from them. The absurdity of an image can reveal something that a direct statement cannot. I am interested in that moment when something familiar becomes strange — when a symbol we have stopped questioning suddenly becomes visible again.

Rather than proposing fixed answers about identity or tradition, my work questions the need for fixed identities in the first place. What makes something authentic? Who decides what tradition is? Why do certain symbols become powerful, and what happens when we start treating them as unquestionable truths?

I see my practice as a continuous process of taking apart and recombining the visual materials that shape our collective imagination. By mixing historical references with contemporary imagery, high and popular culture, sincerity and absurdity, I create situations in which familiar ideas can be looked at from a different position.