site.btaVietnam Exhibition Opens in Varna

A photo exhibition, entitled A Vast Space in Vietnamese Way, was opened in Varna on Wednesday by the young Vietnamese studies Expert Dayana Ivanova, Assistant Lecturer and Researcher at the Department of African and Indo-Pacific Studies of Sofia University. 

Ivanova told BTA that her first visit to the country in Southeast Asia was in 2016, after which she started a master's degree there, studying the country's language, culture, history and traditions. She gradually accumulated material for her photo project at the exhibition, which aims to tell a story about Vietnam and to present Vietnamese culture in Bulgaria.

Ivanova said that even though globalism is influencing it, Vietnamese society is still more patriarchal than Bulgarian society. The people of Vietnam manage to combine the modern with the traditional, choosing which way to go by learning from their history. "There is something to learn from the Vietnamese, to see the wisdom of the people of the East, and to become more calm and persistent despite the stressful hectic everyday life", Ivanova pointed out.

Ivanova noted that Bulgaria is not an unknown place on the map for the people of Vietnam, as young people study a compulsory poem about the Bulgarian Rose at high school, while older people remember that many Vietnamese worked in Bulgaria a few decades ago.

The exhibition is curated by the young Bulgarian photographer Michaela Aroyo, winner of the Inge Morat International Award for Photography in 2023, and marks the opening of the new programme of the Amorpha Youth Foundation in Varna.