Programmable LED text display
96 × 16 cm
Curated by Gergana Minkova
Bobbina Cultural Space, Sofia, Bulgaria, 2025

DIS/VOICED

«THIS IS MY VOICE. BUT YOU ARE READING IT BECAUSE I CANNOT SPEAK IT.»

DIS/VOICED was presented as part of A/POLITICAL, a group exhibition responding to escalating political and societal fragmentation and questioning the position of contemporary Bulgarian art within these conditions. Rather than approaching the political solely through explicit statements or ideological positions, the work turns to a more fundamental question: what does it mean to have a voice without the conditions to be heard?

A continuous stream of text moves across an LED display, transforming speech into light. Language remains present, but the body that might have spoken it is absent. There is no breath, tone, hesitation or volume — only words circulating through a technological interface. What appears to be communication therefore becomes evidence of its own interruption.

The work approaches silence not as an absence of speech, but as a condition produced through unequal access to audibility. A voice may exist, articulate itself and occupy public space, while still failing to acquire the status of something that demands a response.

Conceptually, the work is linked to VIII. Justice, understood not as an image of law or moral judgement, but as an archetype of balance, distribution and the structures through which recognition is granted. Here, justice becomes a question of audibility: who is granted the position of a speaking subject, whose words acquire weight, and who is merely made visible?

DIS/VOICED does not represent the absence of a voice. It examines the mechanisms through which a voice can remain present and still be denied its force.