This year's M-tel awards for contemporary Bulgaria art wrapped up on the evening of July 24 2008 with a prize-conferring ceremony in Plovdiv. The competition has been held annually since 2005.

Artists Eva Davidova, Sasho Stoitsov and Simeon Stoilov were handed their awards by mobile phone operator M-tel's executive director Josef Vinatzer; the prizes consisted of 2000 leva, a certificate and a commitment from M-tel to buy the winning pieces.

Unlike many such competitions, where awards are first presented and then all the entries are shown, for the M-tel awards, all submissions were on display at an abandoned tobacco factory warehouse-turned-exhibition space and at Banya Starinna (The Old Bath), an architectural landmark inherited from the Romans, both in Bulgaria's third-largest city Plovdiv, from June 18 2008.

Though the outcome was positive in itself, founder and organiser of the project Irina Batkova said in a press release that few appropriate spaces existed in the country to allow large-scale art shows. This led organisers to search out alternative spaces, so as to give the authors freedom of expression without being limited by walls, floor or roof.

The exhibition of works was the largest such – at 2000 sq m – in Bulgaria to date.

Again atypical for such events, there were no specific entry categories, with the jury – Elisaveta Moussakova, Dimitar Grozdanov, Katrin Sarieva, Dimitar Cholakov and Mladen Mladenov – simply selecting the three most-interesting and original pieces.

Batkova said: “Art in Bulgaria, following European and worldwide tendencies, passes outside traditional limits and communicates freely without being limited to a certain medium. This led to our decision to chose the winners without having pre-defined categories, such as those that originated in classical means of expression as models to help classify artistic creations.”

German art curator and Free University Berlin professor Marc Glöde, a special guest for this year's project, said that he was surprised by the very strong works it comprised. “They hold the potential to excite and awaken the senses,” he said in the July 25 press release.

Glöde also said that Bulgarian art was making a name for itself on the world art map, and that all that was happening here in the country in this sphere was worth paying attention to. So inspired was he by what he saw that, come autumn, he will present a selection of his preferred foreign artists at Banya Starinna in Plovdiv.

In total, 45 Bulgarian artists participated in the awards for contemporary Bulgaria. All submissions were made in 2007.

Along with the pieces of the three winning artists, M-tel annually buys six additional art entries, which it, in turns, gives to its top clients as gifts.