On October 10, 2009 the MUSIZ COLLECTION Exhibition opens in the Bulgarian Cultural Institute in Hamburg. For the first time, it will show works from the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sofia (MUSIZ), which can be seen until 1st of November in the Institute’s building specially renovated for the occasion.

In 2005, after a long lobbying campaign and a number of art projects related to the issue of the museum, at the Poduyane railway station in Sofia was announced the opening of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sofia (MUSIZ). Despite the lack of a building, since 2006 the museum has been gathering a collection, part of which are the works included in the exhibition. Specially selected for the event in Hamburg are those of artists, who are already historical figures for contemporary art, such as Valie Export and Martin Kippenberger, as well as of young stars as Anri Sala.

There is more to be seen at the exhibition: the estranged, infantile figures in the paintings of Kathi Barath; the marginal and absurd images, often associated with the representation of trauma, in the paintings of Gunter Reski who graduated in Hamburg; the word-drawings of Fiona Banner - especially "Black Hawk Down", 2004, which is artist’s exploration in the modes of representation and the film narratives in the military movies, such as the one directed by Ridley Scott, paintings from the series of self-portraits of the American artist Jimmie Durham, and photography related to the work “Hans und Grete”, 2003 by Sue de Beer dealing with psychological imbalance and personality disorder in modern society.

The works explore in different ways the relationship between image, text and media representation, in most of the cases referring to the mass media and the global film culture, as well as the patterns of their image production.

MUSIZ develops a local, yet cosmopolitan policy of collecting, which monitors the processes of development of art from the waves of minimalism, conceptualism and pop art until the present day. They have an immediate bearing on the development of the scene of contemporary art in Bulgaria after 1989 which is associated with overcoming the local tradition of abstractionism. Now the museum collection includes mostly artists from the 70-ies and 80-ies of the 20th century till present, naming William Anastasi, Greg Bogin, Clay Ketter, Imi Knoebel, Santiago Sierra, Mark Dion, Daniele Buetti, Italo Zuffi, Christoph Keller, Maria Lindberg, Olaf Nicolai, Alexander Brenner and Barbara Schurz, Wawrzyniec Tokarski, Ralf Ziervogel, Michael Hakimi, Lea Asja Pagenkemper, Sejla Kameric, Alban Muja, son:DA, as well as artists based in Bulgaria.