Katherina Radeva

Amalgamations of personal experience and universal signs

as symbols

Katherina’s Background

Born in 1982, Bulgaria

Since 2000, Katherina has had four solo exhibitions

Her earlier work focused around drawings and screen paintings to portray her opinions and views on the world of society as well as portrayals of famous plays.

Katherina Radeva’s own portrayal of the performance of King Lear

The set design for ‘Smother Mother’ one of Katherina’s solo devised performance – notice how the set is enclosed and claustrophobic giving a sense of smothering

Background to her Work: Katherina uses the universal signs and symbols to

make her performances accessible to the audience.

The experiences are memories which she solidifies into objects and images.

The performances are often rituals that contain old traditions and habits from her country’s past!

‘The basis of my performance pieces are still images that come to life. They create

realities which come from afar-distant times, places, traditions and habits.’

Fallen Fruit – Now you are here, Now you are gone

A solo performance based upon the building and destroying of barriers that are between people and barriers that have been imposed on us by others.

Loosely based on the fall of the Berlin Wall

A journey of childhood, love and freedom!

Katherina uses only a chair, a microphone and 200 small boxes

Fallen Fruit – Now you are here, Now you are gone!

Fallen Fruit – Now you are here, Now you are gone

Katherina’s whole ideology in many of her solo performances revolve around the idea of freedom

From a young age she wanted to break through her childhood barrier and leave Bulgaria for Western Civilisation

Bulgaria’s old traditions and the restriction within their politics had been the barriers imposed on her

This solo performance was all about freedom from the past and from her childhood!

Native Birds Examines what

it feels like to be free

Uses elements of Bulgarian folklore, simple movements, text and video

Set in a small floor space filled with thousands of paper birds!

Based around the story of five Bulgarian doctors, wrongly imprisoned from 1999 – 2007, for allegedly infecting children with HIV

Also provides a insight into her personal journey of an Eastern European woman living in the West!

Native Birds

Native Birds

By using paper birds as a simplistic representation of the idea of freedom – the young girl flying the nest to explore a new world.

Her idea of freedom also gives recognition to moving from childhood to adulthood – freeing oneself from those barriers that had been imposed during childhood.

It’s ideologies are very similar to that of ‘Fallen Fruit’

‘Simple representation of an idea lends an importance to the symbolic and the metaphorical as a means with engaging with the now enabling me to act within the cultural present whilst remembering the past.’

Settling Dirt

Bulgaria is very important to Katherina, as it is her home country

In her work she portrays the struggles that her country face, due to politics, restrictions and religion.

Katherina moved to Western Europe as she believed she was not fulfilling her desires, being held down by old laws in Bulgaria.

She portrays this need to break free in the performance ‘Settling Dirt’.

Settling Dirt

A solo performance about abandonment, unfulfilled desire, discomfort and a loss of the past.

About a girl wrapped up in her idealistic representation of love, life and sex!

She is sitting on the edge of the bath eating an apple

A back projection of a house in Bulgaria that is slowly sinking, plays in the background

The house is a metaphor for the struggle of the body as it begins to decay and the beauty is lost.

Settling Dust

Bibliography

Books ‘The Performance Studies Reader’ by Henry Bial ‘Performance Art: From futurism to the Present’

by RoseLee Goldberg

Internet http://www.katherinaradeva.co.uk/artist.html