Curated by Irina Batkova
In previous years, Boryana Petkova’s artistic practice was focused on performative drawing, presenting the energy of the creative act as a gesture towards understanding the context in which the work takes place. The artist’s hand movements outlined, in pencil, and on various surfaces, her desire to reach and master the physical territories of subjective personal space. Exploring the boundaries - those we inflict on ourselves and those externally imposed on us as part of her artistic philosophy, personifies the natural human urge in search of our hidden essence. Petkova’s latest performances are a natural continuation of this practice. Her body is no longer simply a tool for expressing ideas, but an object of analysis and the overcoming of limitations is achieved through sinking into the deep layers of her personal story. The two performances that form the basis of the exhibition in the SAMCA gallery draw the lines of the subjective geography that begins in childhood and shapes the present.
"Nо Blood Relations" focuses on relationships with characters who have functioned as cornerstones in Petkova’s personal story, arranged like figures from the well known children’s elastics jumping game. It goes under different names and with slight deviations in the rules depending on the cultural context, is played by children in countries across Europe, Asia, Africa, North and South America. The game is typically played by three people - two stretch the string tautly around their ankles, and a third must accomplish certain moves without tripping or becoming entangled. In Petkova’s performance, the pieces of elastic are a complex diagram where multiple human relationships intersect, making jumping almost impossible. The bands connecting the symbolic figures create random intersecting directions and, in this complex knot, the body is subjected to a painful physical act of entanglement and disentanglement while seeking the limit of endurance. Through this act, the consequences of our relationships with others are seen as an inexorable imprint on the psychological processes of our perception of the world. Here, the line an extremely crucial element of the artist’s practice is treated as an object that creates extreme tension on and discomfort for the physical body. It does not draw a trajectory to facilitate its movement - on the contrary, it is an obstacle that must be unravelled and overcome in the context of many other lines set by new connections in fresh, unexpected directions.
In "Mother Tongue", Petkova focuses on the role of the tongue as a cognitive tool, examined through the most distant memorised phrases that defined her childhood relationship with her mother. The pressure of the metal blades of the knives against the dorsum of her tongue, the need for a continuous-to the point of exhaustion-cyclicity of the rhythm in scraping off the words, perfectly visualises the subconscious side of the act of sublimation. Having herself progressed from childhood to motherhood, exchanging the country where she was born for a new one and, accordingly, for a new language, she presents us with a process in which the individual struggles to transform the traumas that obstruct any natural realisation. The artist consciously explores the threshold of her own propensity for self-harm in the process of erasing part of her memories, presented in the form of clichéd phrases, and personifying the power hierarchy of parents and children.
The "SeeN" installation explores the boundaries of the visible and invisible, bringing into focus the mechanical optics of visual perception, its dependence on light and the performance of visional lenses. Placed in such a laboratory environment of vague images and a sculptural object composed of spectacles of different people, the viewer becomes aware of the subjectivity of the corporeal, which, in this case, is a metaphor for the subjectivity of the mental reality of each individual and their ability to perceive and interpret the world. Through the corrective optics of the outsider’s gaze, the viewer becomes immersed in the unstable state of the visible features of the objects and the content behind them. Thus, Petkova’s installation transforms into a visual synthesis Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concept that "what is proper to the visible is, we said, to be the surface of an inexhaustible depth: this is what makes it able to be open to visions other than our own".
In "Nо Blood Relations", Boryana Petkova uncompromisingly presents a hidden part of her inner world, one that we usually suppress and do not reveal to others. In this way, she places her practice at the centre of the debate about the role and meaning of art as a tool in the pursuit of truth and the price an artist is willing to pay.
