Gallery +359 and the Water Tower remain in memory as a single, long-term project—diverse, rich, professionally ambitious, commercially fragile, authentic, heterogeneous, yet deeply genuine.
Plus 359, Sofia, BG
2017 - 2026
27 May marks the final day of Gallery +359 at the Water Tower in Sofia, as it continues its journey as part of Collect Gallery.
Over the last decade, this space was dedicated to contemporary art — a place for exhibitions, encounters, experiments, and conversations between artists, curators, collectors, and audiences.
During this period, Gallery +359 realized more than 60 exhibitions featuring over 100 artists, alongside performances, lectures, and numerous cultural events that transformed the Water Tower into one of Sofia’s distinctive spaces for contemporary art.
What began as a single gallery gradually evolved into a wider network of projects, collaborations, and spaces extending beyond national borders.
Collect Gallery brings together our spaces, projects, and future initiatives within a shared structure dedicated to the development of contemporary art and the culture of collecting.
This transformation is not an ending, but an evolution — one that allows us to expand our vision beyond exhibition-making alone and to build lasting relationships between artists, artworks, collectors, and communities.
We extend our deepest gratitude to all artists, curators, collectors, partners, and visitors who became part of the history of Gallery +359 at the Water Tower throughout these years. The Water Tower remains an important part of our story.
Stay tuned for our upcoming projects.
Exhibitions / Projects
The Water Tower
Over the past several years, we walked the gently sloping streets of Lozenets towards the Water Tower—a place that gradually developed a distinctive aura of its own. Gallery +359 established itself through its programme as a space of possibilities, where artistic ideas could be realised that would have been difficult to imagine in any other place or context.
Built in 1929, the Water Tower is an extraordinary architectural structure, and it was precisely this quality that transformed almost every exhibition into a site-specific intervention. Each project had to engage with the absence of right angles, the curves, the height, the hidden spaces surrounding the reservoir, and the narrow staircase leading to the top of the tower. The architecture never remained neutral; instead, it became an active participant in the way artworks unfolded throughout the space.
This offered something that is still rare within the local art scene: scale. Not merely in the physical sense, but as the possibility for an artwork to exceed its own boundaries and expand into a complete spatial situation. Many of the projects realised in the Water Tower functioned as large-scale installations in which movement, sound, light, objects, height, and architecture became integral parts of the work itself.
Looking back, however, the Water Tower was above all an evolving project that, partly consciously and partly intuitively, succeeded in creating a vibrant environment around itself. During the gallery’s nearly ten years of activity, we encountered numerous exhibitions and projects connected with water—a presence literally embedded in the memory, function, and very structure of the building. Water appeared simultaneously as a social phenomenon, a natural force, an acoustic element, a form of movement, and a model for thinking about interconnected ecological systems.
This thread could be traced across a wide range of exhibitions and projects—from works engaging with sound art and acoustic environments to investigations of infrastructure, ecology, and the transformation of materials. Themes such as currents, animal ecosystems, the sea, climate, as well as fountains, pipes, and the transformation of objects and matter reappeared time and again in different forms, as though the space itself continually returned artists to its original function and memory.
At the same time, sound gradually became one of the defining elements of the gallery’s programme—not merely as an addition to the visual environment, but as a primary way of thinking about space itself. Many exhibitions approached sound sculpturally, engaging with the acoustics of the reservoir, echo, and the bodily experience of movement and resonance. Several projects brought together artists, musicians, architects, and sound artists, creating complex spatial environments and immersive experiences.
A wide range of media and artists passed through the space, while others returned repeatedly in different constellations, gradually developing their own relationship with the tower. The Water Tower provided a platform for artists such as Martian Tabakov, who created his sculptural musical instruments there; Antoni Rayzhekov, for whom sound is a sculptural material; as well as Stella Vasileva, Kalina Dimitrova, the collaborative exhibitions of Zhelko Terziev and Krasimir Terziev, Stefan Ivanov, Iskra Blagoeva, Georgi Georgiev–Jorras, Cedric Van Parys, Georgi Ruzhev, Ivaylo Avramov, Yuliyan Tabakov, Andris Eglītis, Mihail Mihaylov—who represented Bulgaria at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022—and many others. In most of these exhibitions, the artworks were not presented as autonomous artistic objects but as parts of broader “thought experiments,” to borrow the phrase used by Zhelyo Terziev and Krasimir Terziev to describe their approach in the exhibition Schrödinger’s Cat (2021).
At the same time, Gallery +359 at the Water Tower never became a space devoted to producing commercially recognisable exhibitions or artists oriented towards easy market success. On the contrary, its programme was driven by an interest in artistic experimentation and in complex, often difficult-to-market forms of installation, sound, performance, and spatial thinking. Artists were invited into dialogue with curators, resulting in a programme shaped by a remarkable diversity of both artistic and curatorial voices. Among the curators were Irina Batkova, Snezhana Krasteva, Petar Tsanev, Vesela Nozharova, Daniela Radeva, Vasil Vladimirov, myself, Boyana Dzhikova, Yovo Panchev, Gergana Minkova, and others—occasionally including artists who also assumed the curatorial role.
I vividly remember Georgi Ruzhev’s 2020 exhibition A Temple Less Sweet—one of the artist’s few exhibitions of such scale. Ruzhev remains, to this day, an authentic “hero” of Bulgaria’s (almost) existing underground art scene. The exhibition introduced an atmosphere of phantasmagoria, mythology, movement, and ritual, transforming the tower into an environment for complex, diverse, eclectic, and profoundly individual artistic thought.
Over the years, numerous initiatives also developed around the gallery: conversations between artists, residency programmes, research-based formats, support for artistic investigations, as well as a comprehensive online programme presenting artists during the COVID period. Together, these activities gradually fostered the sense that the Water Tower functioned not simply as an exhibition venue, but as an organic environment for the emergence of ideas and the exploration of their possible realisations.
In this sense, although the exhibition programme was not always strictly consistent in its curatorial policy, it nevertheless succeeded in creating life around the space itself. It became, in Mina Minov’s words, life-specific—a term he coined for his own artistic initiative in the Water Tower. In his performance, he threw everyday objects from the height of the tower, reenacting gestures and stories from the time when the building stood abandoned and he, together with other local children, secretly entered it.
Gallery +359 and the Water Tower remain in memory as a single, long-term project—diverse, rich, professionally ambitious, commercially fragile, authentic, heterogeneous, yet deeply genuine. We “heard” many singular voices there. I only hope they will not remain as lonely and isolated as the song of the mysterious solitary whale evoked in Itamat Gov’s exhibition Signals from the Loneliest Whale (2022).
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Vladiya Mihaylova
Curator and Cultural Theorist
Snejana Krasteva
Curator, Co-founder and co-director of Eastern Balkans Institute for Art and Architecture
The space of the Water Tower in Sofia, which the gallery took over for nearly a decade, became a unique experimental ground for many emerging and established artists. I have seen some of the most audacious, conceptually rigorous and thought-provoking projects that allowed artists to create site-specific works at a scale and leap of imagination worthy of a museum-level presentation. The care and support (technical, but also financial) that was put into their realisation by the team should only be a standard of work for many of our institutions. I consider its closure a huge loss for our art scene, and an alarming signal that we do not do enough from our side as curators, critics and art lovers, to support and sustain the existence of such spaces for the development of our professional community and contemporary art production in Bulgaria.