I Want No Competition, I Want Only Pleasure

The crisis of space is one of the defining conditions of contemporary life. In his photo series I Want No Competition, I Want Only Pleasure, Ivan Stefanov explores how young people navigate their everyday existence between work, home, leisure, and the digital world. Within this newly constituted hybrid space, the real and the virtual, the personal and the professional, the intimate and the public exist simultaneously, without clear boundaries.

This spatial context is inseparable from a broader shift in the way time is perceived. It is no longer thought of as a line between past and future; instead, it unfolds as a sequence of fragmented moments focused on the immediacy of the present. That’s how pleasure acquires both a hedonistic and a countercultural dimension. Through this gesture, the individual seeks to reclaim a sense of autonomy within play, leisure, or creative practice. Pleasure thus operates as a form of resistance against the pressure of constant productivity and the social imperative to remain perpetually efficient.

This perspective may also be viewed through the lens of Jonathan Crary and his book 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, where contemporary life is described as a state of constant activity. In such a world, the individual is caught in a continuous cycle of connectivity, communication, labor, and consumption, while moments of stillness gradually disappear. For Crary, sleep remains the last territory of human life not yet fully commodified. Stefanov, however, suggests another way out of this mode: reclaiming pleasure as a space of freedom.

The large-format photographs presented in the exhibition depict carefully staged visual scenarios that draw on the logic of cinematic photography. The scenes appear documentary, yet they are deliberately constructed. Digital post-production – an integral part of the process – generates a new state of the photographic image, in which reality is at once recognizable and transformed. The hybrid space that emerges in these works is both existential and cultural: a field where different elements coexist without clear divisions. This blurring gives rise to a crisis of spatial identity, in which the boundaries between private life and professional existence dissolve, and pleasure often becomes subordinate to productivity.

Among the central motifs in the exhibition is the man in the darkroom, who repeatedly produces the same portrait in trays of developer. This image functions as a metaphor for fixation and recurrence. It evokes an obsessive action in which the original gradually loses its uniqueness, while the subject becomes absorbed into the procedure itself, into the rhythm of repetition and the mechanics of the process.

Within the images’ apparent realism, the real and the staged coexist and continuously rewrite one another. The photographs operate as contemporary tableaux, visually compelling and conceptually dense. These carefully constructed situations confront the viewer with questions about existence within the evolving configurations of space, time, and subjectivity in the contemporary world.

– Genadi Gatev, PhD