In addition to its political meaning, the term "foreign affairs" now has an artistic connotation - thanks to three young artists from Bulgaria, Holland and Israel.

Their Foreign Affairs exhibition, which combines drawings, photographs and digital images, is on display at the Euro-Bulgarian Cultural Centre at 17 Alexander Stamboliiski Blvd until June 9.

The three artists studied at the Dutch Art Institute in Enschede, the Netherlands. This is their first exhibition as a group, although some of them have already participated in other events together.

Dutch artist Marijn Akkermans contributed his big-sized drawings, which measure about 1.5 to 2m, to the project. His works show interactions between big masculine figures and a substantially smaller one. "I have used cartoon books as a basis to draw figures of terrorists, doctors and villains, and all kinds of masculine characters," said Akkermans. "Then I combined them with my own private figure, usually the smaller one. The smaller figure is also a sort of a joke of myself. It is not a child or an adult, but something in between."

The artist defined the majority of his works as being about the immaturity of adult dreams and the impossibility of making them real.

As part of the project, Israeli Benjamin Alfariah has arranged four large-sized photographs which consider the relationship between the individual and his environment. His works are based on a series of the artist's self-portraits in which the face or figure of the person is out of focus and the actual focus of the photographs falls on the background.

"Somehow, I feel for the person in the street," Alfariah said. "The person who wakes up every day at the same time, goes to work, then goes back home. Nobody is really interested in him and he is melting into society and its background. The only time people say something about him is when he's dead."

For the young artist, mediocre people are intriguing. Therefore, in his photographs you can see a blurred face, but cannot actually recognize it. Alfariah said that was the average person in the street.

The Bulgarian representative in the group is Veronika Tzekova who does not describe herself as a painter or a sculptor, but simply as an artist. Her series of digital images named Mimicry presents a small fictitious figure resembling a baby in different real environments and situations. Tsekova said she did not want to involve any sexual connotations in her work, therefore, her little creatures - whom she refused to refer as babies - do not have any gender.

"For me they are not babies," the artist explained. "They act more like grown-ups rather than like children." She said she used children because they were more open and vulnerable to influence from the outside - media, society, and what they see around them. "At the same time, they act much more open and unprejudiced to what they see. So I am using children, but my point is not only children, its people in general, how they influence each other, how the media influence our lives."

As part of the Foreign Affairs project, Tsekova has also exhibited photo prints of a sculpture she has been working on. The work depicts a girl who is sitting on the shoulders of a boy trying to poke his eye out. "I have seen quite a lot of cruelty among children," the artist explained. "I think under the influence of what they see around them, and it is disturbing that these children are growing like that because then you get grown-ups who are cruel as well."

The three artists decided to undertake the joint project because they found many similarities in the content of their work. "Though we work in totally different ways - you can see computer work, pure photographs or drawings - there is always some kind of humour, some kind of erotic layer," explained Akkermans.

The name of the project emerged from the fact that the three came from different nationalities. "In English, this is a political term and, at the same time, affairs has this naughty meaning of `having an affair,'" said Akkermans, adding that they wanted to make a mix of serious stuff and humour.

The Bulgarian, Israeli and Dutch artists do not consider their work typical for their nationalities, but rather universal. According to them, its meaning is something deeper than the nationality or the culture from which they came.