Hello, today you have a free day in Marseille
Opening: 30.10.2025 | 18:00 o`clock
Where: Urban Gallery, Marseille, France
Exhibition period: 30.10 - 15.11.2025
In October 2025, the second phase of the creative exchange between Bulgaria and France took place in collaboration with Visionary & Urban Gallery - Marseille, a continuation of the Abstract Residency, organized by Visionary in April 2025 with the participation of the French artist Marion Safriouin.
The Bulgarian artist Gergana Tabakova took an active part in the first phase of the exchange and had a key role in the second phase. She went to a residency in France from 13.10. to 1.11.2025 at the atelier La Miroiterie, where her host on the French side was Safriouin herself - the founder and curator of the atelier.
Gergana Tabakova’s artworks, created during her residency in Marseille, explore the city as a living organism formed through the interconnection of two parallel systems. The central image uniting this reflection is water — an element and a substance that links the two dimensions of urban life: the natural and the human.
On one side lies the sea — vast, fluid, unrestrained. On the other — the system of pipes and canals through which the city seeks to contain and direct the same element. These systems coexist and mirror one another — both sustain life and mark its circulation.
In Gergana’s series, linear, almost documentary images gradually dissolve into fluid, indeterminate fragments — suspended between shore and seabed. The very materials of Marseille — pink limestone, mother-of-pearl — echo this duality. The artist discovers in them a material analogy to the sea’s fluidity: a city built from the sediment of its own waters. This homogeneity lies at the core of her work — the urban structure (walls, pipes, pavements) and the natural fluidity (waves, sand, salt) interact as two layers of a single organism. Her works do not oppose the solid and the liquid, but emphasize their coexistence — how architectural systems carry the imprint of the sea, while the sea bears traces of human intervention.
Gergana Tabakova (born 1992) is a visual artist based in Sofia, Bulgaria. She finished her MA degree in Painting at National Academy of Arts, Sofia. Gergana has a keen interest in the interaction between painting and other visual arts, in pursuit of which she obtained her PhD from the National Academy of Art (2022). Gergana is currently an assistant professor of Painting in the Textile – Art and Design Department, NAA, Sofia.
A key part of the artist’s credo is to perceive the objects and the situations as an occasion to express their inner potential as immaterial information. Gergana’s artworks represent a part of a research in which rudimentary fascination, emotion and thought, engendered by the connection between immaterial and material object, are linked together.
As a painter, her work explores the fundamental elements of painting—surface, texture, and color—and their potential to exist beyond traditional confines. These elements are approached as autonomous subjects within a dynamic visual experience, liberated from their conventional, object-based roles. Gergana’s compositions challenge the rectangular canvas, treating it as an extension of space where materiality, structure, and cultural symbolism intersect.
This layered approach is rooted in an exploration of how cultural perceptions of order, hierarchy, and balance are embedded in the historical and functional uses of space. Architectural and spatial elements resonate within the work as conduits for understanding the evolving relationship between people and their environments. These elements carry the weight of their cultural and social histories, reflecting both their intended purpose and the accumulated meanings they have acquired over time. By deconstructing and reinterpreting these forms, the artist seeks to question their traditional associations and recontextualize them to reveal a more fluid, dynamic interplay between the past and the present
--
The Bulgarian group's trip to Marseille and back to Sofia is supported by the Sofia Municipality, "Mobility 2025" program.
Partners from the French side are Urban Gallery, La Miroiterie, the association of Bulgarians in Marseille - Provance Bulgarie.
Photos: Visionary archive