Ivan Stanev (, born 29 June 1959) is an author, theatre and film director, scenographer and new media artist, who has been living in Berlin since 1988, and more recently in Paris.
Biography
Ivan Stanev was born in the city of Varna, Bulgaria. His mother, Donka Raikova, was a lawyer and poet and his father, Stanju Stanev, was an engineer and photographer. He enrolled into a German-language high school, while also studying intensively French, Russian and English.
He got his degree in Theatre Directing from the National Academy for Theatre and Film Arts in Sofia. While a student in the academy, he founded a clandestine avant-garde theatre group, which led to severe conflicts with censorship in Communist Bulgaria. Not allowed to work as a theatre director anymore, he went on to study philosophy at the Sofia University, and started to translate the works of Theodor Adorno and Heiner Muller, in the meantime writing plays, poems and essays, all to be published much later.
In 1988, he was invited to present his theatre production called The Wound Woyzeck at a theatre festival in West-Berlin. He decided not to return to Bulgaria and to live in exile instead. He began to write in German and to stage his own plays in Berlin.
Since 1999, he has also worked on several major Franco-German theatre productions. Due to his growing interest in visual arts, he directed and produced two experimental films: Villa Dei Misteri and Luxor Las Vegas. In 2009 he finished his first independent feature film, shot on 35 mm, called Moon Lake, produced by Donka Angelova.
He currently lives in Berlin and Paris and works in both Germany and France.
Writings
In Bulgarian
The Exterminated Denizens (excerpts from the sketchbooks of a démodé modernist) - poetry, drama, theory: 1985-1987. Publishing house "Virga", Sofia 1994, () In German 1992 Lapsus Linguae, Autoren-Kollegium Berlin 2000 Postskriptum, a poem, Juliettes Literatursalon Berlin 2002 Villa Dei Misteri, Juliettes Literatursalon Berlin 2003 Luxor Las Vegas, Konkursbuch Verlag Berlin/Tübingen 2009 Moon Lake, a poem, Publishing house Altera 2017 Abrasax Asteroiden, a poem, Bleibende Steinzeit/Tumult/Sonderzahl Wien 2018 Place Fantôme, dramatic poem, T.INTE Berlin In English 2023 Poems in Posthuman Akkadian
Films
Films shot on video
Villa dei misteri (2003) Luxor Las Vegas (2006) Le Bleu du Ciel (2016) Inge (2019)
Films shot on 35 mm
Moon Lake (2009)
Web Television
TTV - Totleben TV (2023)
Installations
Don Juan im Kumpelnest 3000 zu Berlin (2000) Hollywood Forever (2004) Place Fantôme (2018)
New Media Art
CHEZ TOTLEBEN | Phantom Art Apartment (2023) GOT | Garden of Totleben (2023) TO DESCA | Totleben´s Writing Desk (2023)
Exhibitions
ANIMA MUNDI - RITUALS | VENICE(2022) ANIMA MUNDI - CONSCIOUSNESS | VENICE(2022) ROME INTERNATIONAL ART FAIR | MEDINA ART GALLERY | ROME(2022) LONDON CONTEMPORARY | THE LINE CONTEMPORARY ART SPACE | LONDON(2022) MISS TOTO K. | SEVEN STAR GALLERY | BERLIN(2022)