Set within a historic 1920s building in Sofia’s city centre, ALL-U-RE provides the backdrop for Richie Culver’s upcoming exhibition The Builder’s Daughter (15th –18th May), presented by PASSAGE, explores Culver’s instinct for fragmentation. Fragments from album artwork, noise ephemera, and visual detritus tied to labels like Industrial Coast or Deathbed Tapes resurface here, reworked into unstable compositions. The exhibition’s title gestures towards a neighbour who supported Culver’s family after loss, embedding the work in an undercurrent of grief, resilience, and improvised solidarity. Rather than narrativise that history, Culver lets it sit in the gaps.
“Rainbow Snuff” – Mixed Media on canvas, 80x60cm, 2025
Over the past few years, Culver has moved fluidly between disciplines, from performances at Berghain and Atonal to collaborations with Camden Arts Centre and Carlos/Ishikawa, even soundtracking a runway show for LOEWE. That same porousness runs through The Builder’s Daughter, where sound, image, and social history collapse into one another. We caught up with Culver to talk about returning to collage, working through fragments, and building a practice that stays deliberately open.
The Builder’s Daughter comes from a very personal place. How do you approach translating it into a body of work that others can enter?
These works began as a way of returning to visual practice after a period focused on music, rather than with the intention of communicating a specific personal narrative. Because of that, I’m less interested in translating the work in a literal sense, and more in allowing it to remain open. I try to build images that can be engaged with intuitively, without requiring prior knowledge of their context. The personal element is there, but it isn’t something the viewer needs to fully access in order to enter the work. I’m interested in how long a viewer can stay with an image before needing additional information, and whether meaning can emerge through attention alone. In that sense, the work becomes a space others can enter through their own associations, rather than something fixed or fully explained.
“To Him” – Mixed Media on canvas, 40x30cm, 2025
The title refers to a real figure connected to care and support. How did that relationship shape the tone of the exhibition?
The emotional tone of the exhibition is shaped by both the process of making and the relationship referenced in the title. The works are constructed through collage, tearing apart older pieces and reassembling them into new forms, which became a way of working through ideas of loss, continuity, and rebuilding. There’s a sense of fragmentation, but also of care in how things are held together again. The title, The Builder’s Daughter, refers to a woman from my hometown who became a source of support for my mother after my stepfather passed away. I think that relationship, quiet, steady, and grounded in care, echoes through the work. It’s not depicted directly, but it informs the emotional register as something held, reconfigured, and sustained over time.
Your work often sits between sound, image, and text. Do you find these different disciplines to be part of the same language?
They don’t really feel separate from me. They’re just different ways of arriving at the same place. I move between sound, image, and text quite instinctively, and often one will lead into another. A piece of writing might become a vocal, or an image might come out of something I’ve been thinking about sonically. It’s less about choosing a discipline and more about following a feeling or idea and letting it take the form it needs. All three share a similar rhythm and sensitivity, so I think of them as part of the same language, just spoken in different ways.
“Writing her diary” – Mixed Media on canvas, 50x40cm, 2026
Collage plays a central role in this show. What keeps drawing you back to working with fragments rather than complete images?
Fragments feel more honest to how I experience things. I don’t really see memory, or emotion, or even identity as complete images. They’re partial, shifting, and often built out of what’s left behind. Working with collage lets me stay close to that. There’s also something important for me in using existing material, especially my own older works. Tearing them apart and reassembling them becomes a way of continuing rather than discarding, of carrying something forward but allowing it to change. It holds a sense of damage and care at the same time. I think complete images can sometimes feel too resolved. Fragments leave space. They ask the viewer to do the same work, to fill in gaps or sit with uncertainty. That openness is what keeps me coming back to it.
Many of the materials come from your own archive, including work tied to your sonic practice. What does it mean to revisit and rework those fragments now?
Revisiting those fragments feels less like looking back and more like continuing something that never really finished. A lot of the material, whether visual or tied to the sonic work, already carries a certain emotional weight, so bringing it back into the studio now isn’t neutral. It’s about re-encountering it from a different position. There’s a kind of editing process involved, deciding what stays, what’s removed, and how things can be reconfigured. That mirrors how memory works for me, not fixed, but constantly shifting and being reinterpreted over time. By reworking these pieces, I’m not trying to preserve them as they were, but to let them evolve into something that reflects where I am now. It also ties back into the idea of continuity. Nothing is really discarded. The past is still active within the work, just in a different way.
“Hull 6am” – Mixed Media on canvas, 55x45cm, 2026
There is a strong sense of layering, both materially and emotionally; it can’t be random. What role does instinct play?
It usually starts quite instinctively, cutting, tearing, placing things without overthinking it. I’m trying to stay close to a feeling rather than a plan, but that only gets the work so far. After that, there’s a more controlled stage where I step back and start editing, shifting things, removing parts, working out what’s actually holding and what isn’t. That back and forth is where the layering comes from, each addition changing the weight of what’s already there, so it becomes about knowing when to leave something and when to interrupt it. I don’t see instinct and control as opposites. They rely on each other. It’s similar to how I approach DJing as Quiet Husband in places like Berghain or Tresor, where the sets are very considered in terms of pacing, layering, and how one track sits against another, but still need to feel responsive in the moment. That process of selecting, cutting between, and building something cohesive out of separate parts feels very close to collage, just working with sound instead of physical material.
Themes like labour, masculinity, and care run through the exhibition. How have your thoughts around these ideas evolved while making the work?
They weren’t things I set out to define from the beginning. They came through the process of making and reworking. Using older material, especially work tied to earlier periods of my life, brought those ideas up in a more direct way. Labour, masculinity, and care are all present in the background of that, particularly in relation to where I’m from and the people around me. My understanding of them has shifted from something more fixed to something more open and nuanced, with less interest in presenting a clear position and more in holding the contradictions within them, strength and vulnerability, distance and support, damage and care. The act of tearing work apart and rebuilding it became a way of thinking through those ideas rather than trying to resolve them, so by the end it felt less about representing those themes and more about letting them sit within the work in a quieter, more embedded way.
Your practice moves between underground music contexts and contemporary art spaces. How does shifting between these worlds affect how you see your own work?
I don’t really separate them in a strict way, but moving between those contexts does shift how the work is received, and that in turn affects how I think about it. I’ve been connected to underground music spaces since I was at school in the mid 90s, so that way of thinking runs deep within me and shapes how I see the world. Even now, being in my 40s, I still feel like that’s the driving force behind everything I do. That awareness of movement, of trends shifting, of things constantly evolving, feeds directly into the work.
There is a feeling of things being held together, but not fully resolved. Is that sense of instability something you actively pursue?
I’m more interested in that in-between state, where things feel held but still open. It reflects how I understand experience, not as something clean or finished, but as something ongoing and slightly unstable. That instability isn’t negative. It allows space for movement, for change, for different readings to exist at once.
“Straight Panic” – Household paint and card on plastic, dimensions variable, 2026
Looking ahead, what feels most open or unresolved in your practice right now?
Everything feels unresolved, and it always has, not just in the work but in how I move through life. In the way I think and act, there’s always been this sense of arriving slightly late, or not quite belonging to whatever space I’m in. That carries into the practice as well. I’ve never felt fully part of the art world because I move into the techno world, then into noise, then into spoken word and other underground spaces, but I don’t feel fully rooted in any of them either. I move between these worlds quite freely, but that movement also creates a kind of distance, a sense of being present but not fixed, which can feel like a kind of homelessness within the practice, even around the idea of calling myself an artist. I think that’s also why I value working with Victor and Kindad at PASSAGE so much. They understand the work across all those different forms and have supported it in a genuine way, whether that’s coming to see me DJ at Berghain, engaging with the spoken word pieces, or the more DIY performances. It’s rare to find a platform that recognises that way of moving between things without trying to pin it down. There’s a shared understanding there of a DIY way of thinking and working, which makes it feel like the work can exist as it is, without needing to resolve into something fixed.
Opening on Friday, 15th May from 7 pm at ALL-U-RE, Tsar Kaloyan, 1000 Sofia, the exhibition situates Culver’s work in a field where image, sound, and text bleed into one another, shaped by memory, collaboration, and the unstable conditions they move through.
