As a laureate of the Prix Carta Bianca, I was invited to present my work.
During my presentation, my daughter came on stage and began to write words and labels on my back — inscriptions invisible to the audience.
The hidden words became visible. What was once stigma, shame, or judgment turned outward — transformed into affirmation and power.
An excerpt from a text by Hou Hanru on the work of Boryana Petkova
For Boryana Petkova, art making is a permanent performance for a “prodigal girl” to “return to the normal world”. Born in 1985, in Sofia, Bulgaria, she spent most of her youth period as a wild rebellion, a street stroller, looking for self-realization, trying to survive in a post-communist society struggling collectively to embrace capitalist “democracy” driven by consumerism and economic disparity in more or less awkward manners. Facing the inevitable solitude and desiring for love, she was drawn to lead a kind of underground and rebellious life: alcohol, drugs and sex, among other things, became daily ingredients in her life… But she was by no means satisfied and looked for ways to escape from these “soft prisons”. She was an artist even then, instinctively resisting and searching for other forms of existence. Art provided her a totally new perspective: the addictions are gone. But the spirit of rebellion remains, and has been developed to become the core of her artistic career. She has developed a personal language of expression resorting to body actions – performance, drawings, multi-media installations… Her art has become permanent tests and negotiations with the corporal limit, the very intense relation with the “normal world”, which is actually not normal at all, it’s a world of turmoil, chaos and alienation, in which no one can escapefrom the fate of being marginalized.