A Conversation with Diana Ivanova and Prof. Zeynep Zafer
November 11, 2025, 6:00 p.m.
Ruse Art Gallery invites its audience to a conversation with Diana Ivanova and Prof. Zeynep Zafer – curators and researchers of the exhibition “The Banishment”, on view at the gallery from October 30 to December 31, 2025.
On November 11, Diana Ivanova will arrive from Germany and Prof. Zeynep Zafer – from Turkey, to meet with the audience in Ruse. Together, they will lead a discussion on memory and forgetting, on the ways in which the past continues to live in the present, and on how memory can become a bridge between communities and generations.
The event seeks to open a space for understanding and empathy – not through accusation or justification, but through sharing and human presence. Within the atmosphere of the gallery, this dialogue will search for the language of reconciliation – that fragile balance between remembering and forgetting, between personal and collective experience.
The conversation is part of the accompanying program to “The Banishment” – an exhibition that is more than a documentary project; it is a reflection on how we remember, and on the traces that forgetting leaves behind. The meeting with the curators offers a chance for these stories to come alive again – as human testimonies and as an invitation to understand without forgetting.
Diana Ivanova
Diana Ivanova is a Bulgarian journalist, author, and documentary filmmaker, living between Bonn and Sofia. Her work explores the relationship between memory, trauma, and identity, leading her both to the archives of the former State Security and to the personal stories of people who lived through socialism.
She is the founder of the international “Goat Milk Festival” in the village of Gorna Bela Rechka – a space for encounters and cultural exchange. Ivanova is also the author of the award-winning documentary “Listen” for Radio Free Europe. In her projects, she seeks a form of “slow journalism” – one that heals the wounds of memory through human voices and stories.
Zeynep Zafer
Zeynep Zafer was born in the village of Kornitsa, in the Blagoevgrad region of Bulgaria. Having experienced forced displacement and political persecution during the so-called “Revival Process”, she was among the first ethnic Turks to join the Independent Society for the Protection of Human Rights in Bulgaria.
After her expulsion in 1989, she continued her path at Ankara University, where she is now a Professor and Head of the Department of Bulgarian Language and Literature. She is the author of books and articles on Bulgarian and Russian literature, as well as studies dedicated to cultural memory. Her life and academic work make her voice an authentic testimony to a time when “memory” was dangerous and “forgetting” was enforced.
The joint project of the two curators, “The Visual Archive of Assimilation”, can be explored [here].
