Destination Bulgaria is a travelling gallery, uniting the works of young Bulgarian artists, which is on tour now in Ireland and Spain and will soon arrive back at the art hostel in Sofia.

The project deals with the field of contemporary visual arts - video, photography, slides, installations and sound. "Destination Bulgaria is an opportunity for young artists to honestly express themselves, and is a means of self-definition," said Reni Moneva, an art hostel associate. It is a way of attracting more attention to the places where artists live, and to the way they think, by providing a new type of communication between the visual arts.

Every day, a large potential audience (young travellers) passes by spacious locations, such as railway stations, providing cheap and unlimited possibilities for painters. This young generation of world travellers means that young people are stimulated to accept world diversity, as well as informational, cultural, spiritual and social revelation, and now Usit Colours (a youth travel organization) is one of the associates of the Destination Bulgaria exhibition.

Bulgaria is turning towards the rest of the world in a political and economic sense, while its art and lifestyle is achieving new dimensions. According to Moneva, young Bulgarian artists are all facing the same questions. "What is our position in this rapidly changing world? What place does our country have in the context of a world that has started opening up to us? What are the sounds and images that have suddenly flooded into our public spaces? What are the sounds we hear, the images we see?" she quoted them as asking. She explained that Bulgarian artists have to respond to this new reality and their response is their art, which reveals their identity and unique approach. Their art is their contribution to the world's richness, bonding the world's diversity.

In the same context the Destination Bulgaria project will contribute to the general process of connecting activities in different fields such as business and non-profit art. Creating these links, Destination Bulgaria finds an alternative, corresponding to the future European and world tendencies in communication, delivering messages from a source of one kind, directly to an audience of the same kind, finding these audiences in new, alternative spaces. In this way, Destination Bulgaria is overcoming the rigidity and the low flexibility of the currently existing static gallery spaces. "The project contributes to the popularization and development of the new media arts by giving a deeper and more comprehensive understanding and an example of their flexible, mobile and accessible nature and researches new approaches in the presentation of the contemporary visual arts," Moneva said.

Destination Bulgaria creates a new channel offering more direct and fast media access for artists. This new creative potential, is currently much bigger than the existing limited media channels. The links created by the project will be sustained and even strengthened by transferring the project from the local-international level of integration to a cross-international level. This project could initiate a series of permanent travelling exhibitions in Europe, presenting contemporary visual arts from different European countries. Destination Bulgaria aims at showing the little known face of Bulgaria, as seen through the eyes of artists of the young generation, through their visualized messages for the travelling people of their age, their way of living and interests.

When the tour finishes at the end of October, Destination Bulgaria will be hosted at the Art Hostel. The project, according to Moneva, is a territory in which young Bulgarian artists will find their own identity, as personalities possessing national, European, and universal elements.

The project is organized by the Destination Bulgaria Foundation in cooperation with Usit World, the Bulgarian Photographic Association, Soros Center for the Arts (Sofia) and the European Cultural Foundation. The artists taking part in the exhibition are Svetoslav Stoyanov, Alexander Evtomov, Krassimir Terziev, Boris Missirkov and Georgi Bogdanov.

The video installation called The Children by Ivan Nikolov and Boryana Pandova is a symbolic reflection of the human condition with its dimension of joy. "Trust and fear interwoven in a circle by the invisible force that we call love," the artists commented. The artist and all these children's faces, floating around, shining with joy, trust and fear, are incorporated into the general idea of the installation. Nikolov found these personal and informal relations to be very important for his work.