All those eyes that rest on her, and with which she now seeks to come to terms, shape the armour or corset that protects or constrains the body. Each correcting of vision acts like a magnifying glass that amplifies or distorts the vision, enhancing it with a singularity. As the horizon of our gaze, the gradient images appear as a range of viewpoints that look at the world through a prism. Inclusive and breaking down the cultural boundaries of good and evil, her work flirts with the taboos of our societies by confronting us with sometimes illegal or amoral borderline experiences. Her images are derived from carefree moments shared with her daughters, from her everyday work or a social event, but also from scenes in which she replays her past, when drugs, prostitution, begging and theft were part of her daily life in the suburbs of Sofia. The blurring embodies the tipping point where the brain either believes it sees, or refuses to accept, the evidence of what is happening in front of it. Because it is up to each of us to maintain our status as members of a class, consumers, voyeurs or, on the contrary, to share the sum total of these extreme experiences, be they confused, fantasised or repressed.

As though putting a filter on the brutality of reality, the Bulgarian artist Boryana Petkova performs her past, which she re-photographs through various correction glasses, not to sublimate it or out of nostalgia, but to reveal its masquerades and intensify the fictions that constitute us. This means she uses photography not as a documentary tool, but as an optical play through which she superimposes the camera and the psyche, reality and fiction, seeing and looking. By crossing biological, mechanical, social, individual, conscious or unconscious perspectives, she tears the veil of appearances, and in so doing highlights the norms that rig our gaze.

Boryana Petkova does not seek to illuminate the obscure; rather, she confronts us with our own prejudices and complicit silences – and does so looking us straight in the eyes. So much so that, in reality, what we see depends exclusively on what we are.

Marion Zilio

b. 1985 Sofia, Bulgaria 1998-2008 deconstruction period – research in self destruction and transformation 2011 – 2018 reconstruction period

Boryana's work is raw, carried by emotion. Her approach—often autobiographical, intimate yet open—explores this tension in order to question and experience what it means to be human. Boryana was born in Bulgaria in 1985. From the age of 13, she spent most of her teenage years on the street. For ten years, she pushed the limits of her body and emotions. That breaking point marked the beginning of her return to herself. Art has always been her language—long before she recognized it as a conscious practice. She draws and writes constantly, leaving traces everywhere—in the street, on walls, on clothes, on my skin. Intuitively, her body becomes her tool. Performance brings everything together: body, memory, urgency. It offers her a space where self-destruction transforms into self-reconstruction. She reaches that fragile edge between vulnerability and strength—where she begins to rebuild, using failure as her foundation. The traces of her personal history become lines connecting her body to the collective human experience. She seeks to explore more deeply the invisible threads that connect us—beyond origin, beyond belonging. Rejecting categorization, her aim is not to create boundaries, but to dissolve them.