I EXIST / I RESIST

Year
2025

Collaboration
Darina Naydenova

Medium
LED text installation, 96 × 16 cm

Exhibition
BUNA Varna is an experimental contemporary art festival that transforms public and abandoned spaces into platforms for artistic resistance, dialogue, and visibility. Each year, it explores a central theme — in 2025, that theme is "Discovery and Otherness in the 5.0 Era", addressing identity, borders, and post-human presence in an age of dematerialization and AI.

Set in the culturally layered city of Varna, BUNA brings together local and international artists to challenge established classifications and reclaim the right to opacity, subjectivity, and difference.

Gallery
Pop-up New Ventura, Varna, B
ulgaria


I EXIST / I RESIST is an LED installation that reclaims the language of identity and defiance within systems of control and visibility. Using minimalist text in a format traditionally associated with advertising, alert messages, and digital authority, the work subverts function with meaning. It asserts that even bare presence can be a radical act.

The message “I EXIST / I RESIST” becomes a public mantra: persistent, embodied, unavoidable. It resists the spectacle of image and instead foregrounds the urgency of text, repetition, and rhythm. The binary speaks not of separation, but of simultaneity – existence is resistance, resistance is existence.

Set within a world shaped by algorithmic perception, surveillance culture, and the erosion of nuance, the work refuses simplification. It challenges categorization and demands the right to opacity – to Otherness without translation. The piece does not explain itself, nor does it entertain. It stands, glowing, repeating.

This is not information.
This is a confirmation: I’m here.

The LED sign, often a symbol of public control, becomes a site of poetic interruption. Instead of instructions or data, it offers presence. It acts as a body: a flickering trace of a voice, a signal that does not fade. It draws from traditions of protest and minimalism, but does not illustrate either. It performs a stance.

I EXIST / I RESIST functions not only as a visual statement, but also as a temporal one. It refuses to disappear. It marks time with each pulse. It reminds us that to remain visible, to insist on one's space and voice – even in silence – is an act of defiance in itself.