Dimitrina Sevova
Dimitrina Sevova – Zurich / Sofia
Born 1971, MA in Painting, National Academy of Arts, Sofia, 1998.
Freelance curator, theorist, writer and media artist working in contemporary art and media culture. In 2002, founded with Alain Kessi the critical media art and theory collective code flow (http://www.code-flow.net).
She has been instrumental in fostering the practices and debates around digital culture, gender and politics in Bulgaria through her artistic work and as founder in 1996 and curator until 1999 of the TED Gallery when she was still a student at the Art Academy in Sofia. The TED Gallery was the first independent, off-space for contemporary and media art in Varna. In 1998, Dimitrina Sevova joined the team of the Art Today Association in Plovdiv, Bulgaria as a curator, and initiated and curated the international project “Communication Front /project of electronic and media art and theory/” with three editions 1999-2001 (http://www.cfront.org), a project without equal in South-Eastern Europe, oriented towards the individual and collaborative production of works. As part of the code flow collective she co-curated the project and exhibition “Polyphony – Collaborative Practices, Part 2” at Shedhalle, Zurich, 2005. The same year she curated the international project for media art “Critique of Pure Image – Between Fake and Quotation” in Plovdiv, Bulgaria.
She has lectured at numerous international events, such as “Never look back” in Shedhalle in Zurich (2001), the “make-world festival” in Munich (2001), the conference “Understanding the Balkans” in Skopje (2001), “Konsequenz East-West” in Shedhalle, Zurich, 2002, and with the code flow collective at the symposium “Art – Place – Technology,” Liverpool School of Art and Design / FACT, Liverpool (2006).
She edited and published with Alain Kessi the book CFront 2000 (Sofia: cfront, 2002), a collection of texts developing a critical view on globalization, new technologies and media art in the context of East-West discussions within the art world. In 2004 she published a second book with theoretical texts and interviews, KonsequenZ, with Alain Kessi and Frederikke Hansen, exploring how different people in a critical discursive and political art context struggle to bring their ideals for society and art and their personal everyday behavior to match.
She has participated in numerous international projects, among them, “Virtual Revolutions 2.0” at V2_Organisation in Rotterdam (1998), “The Future State of Balkania” at temp.media.lab at Kiasma in Helsinki (1999) and, as a member of the programming committee, “medi@terra 2001” in Lavrion, Greece.
Solo exhibitions include “Philosophy in the Boudoir,” with conceptual drawings after Sade, at the Ata-Ray Gallery, Sofia, Bulgaria (1996), and “Merry-go-round” at XXL Gallery, Sofia, Bulgaria (1998). In 1998 she was awarded the Grand Prix at the 2nd International Triennial of Graphic Arts in Sofia, and consequently was invited to do a solo exhibition, “Pretty Mouth and Brown My Eyes”, at the 3rd Triennial in 2001, with installations of objects and digital photographs. As part of the art collective code flow she did the cooking show performance “Private National Foods with Multinational Appetites” with accompanying exhibition at the Les Complices gallery in Zurich (2005). Her latest solo exhibition, with code flow, is “luncheon on the grass – postproduction by code flow” at the Haus für Kunst Uri in Altdorf, Switzerland, August–November 2006.