Biography
Krasimira Butseva (b. 1994) is based between Sofia and London. She graduated with BA (Hons) in Photography in 2016, and an MA in Photography in 2017 at the University of Portsmouth, UK. In 2022 she completed a short course in Activist Cinema at UCL. In 2021, she was a fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude, Germany, and in 2022 she was awarded BAZA - Award for contemporary art.
Krasimira is a lecturer on the BA Photography course at London College of Communication, UAL, and a guest lecturer at the University for the Creative Arts Farnham and University of Portsmouth. She is also a co-founder of the British organisation Revolv Collective, and a curator of the archive “History in-between”.
About
In her creative and academic work, she works on political violence, traumatic memory, official and unofficial history of Eastern Europe. Krasimira employs video, photography, installation, sound and text, in the recontextualization of difficult and erased histories in relation to the communist regime. Her works are both part of the gallery space and academic journals.
Her solo exhibitions include: The Neighbours: Forms of Trauma (1945-1989) in SGHG and in studio The Neighbours, Sofia (2022), Are we communists?, GARA, Sofia (2022), Frequencies of Trauma, Structura Gallery, Sofia (2022), History is in the present, Zahariev-Singer Foundation, Malak Izvor (2021) and Balkan Mine, EEP Berlin, Berlin (2019).
A selection of group shows include: Minalo ne minalo, Toplocentrala, Sofia (2022), Orbits, Seen Fifteen Gallery, London (2022), BAZA, SGHG, Sofia (2022), Horizons, Akademie Schloss Solitude, Germany (2021), Intimacy and spectacle in the era of social media, Largo, Sofia (2021), History in-between, Sofia History Museum (2022), New Beginnings, MERTZ, Berlin (2020), Photography & Sculpture, AMP Studios, London (2019), Brighton Photo Fringe, Phoenix Gallery, Brighton (2018), Archives as Medium, Four Corners Gallery, London (2017), Uncertain States/Emergence, Mile End Art Pavilion, London (2016), Pingyao International Photography Festival, Pingyao (2016).
Gallery
Krasimira Butseva
Photographing in unfavourable conditions, 2022.
Video installation
Details
- Photographer: Krasimira Butseva
- Material: video installation, vinyl prints
- Property of: Krasimira Butseva
- Description: Photographing in unfavourable conditions is a multi-media installation that re-appropriates archives of Bulgaria's State Security agency. The films and documents employed were created for educational and training purposes for the Ministry of the Interior and the Militia (1946-1989). Through this visual investigation, I assemble a space in which to question the agency and authority of photography produced by the State. The materials deal with the production of “the objective photograph” - such taken in unfavourable conditions, from secret locations, during an interrogation or an arrest. Such a photograph is produced, in the words of State Security, by complying with technical instructions, and employing specific camera settings, regulations and procedures.
- Copyright: Krasimira Butseva
- References: https://www.capital.bg/moiat_capital/lica/2022/07/28/4373609_dosieto_na_krasimira_buceva/
Krasimira Butseva, Julian Chehirian & Lilia Topouzova
The Kitchen, The Neighbours: forms of trauma (1945-1989), 2022.
Installation
Details
- Photographer: Krasimira Butseva
- Material: Furniture treated with paint, wall filler and liquid latex, TV, Projectors, Speakers & Plants, Sand
- Property of: Krasimira Butseva, Julian Chehirian & Lilia Topouzova
- Description: The Neighbours: forms of trauma (1945-1989) is an installation based on over twenty years of research and eight years of collaboration, exploring the memory of political violence inherited from the communist past. Through modified objects, video and sound design Julian Chehirian, Krasimira Butseva and Lilia Topouzova have created spaces for the memories of people who were interned in the Bulgarian gulag and prisons that existed between 1945 and 1989. The collective's process included over 40 interviews with survivors of the regime's repression. The exhibition recreates the living spaces in which the interviews were conducted. Alongside there are excerpts from the stories of the survivors, sounds and videos from the places where the camps in Belene and Lovech were once located. Erased even before the collapse of the communist regime, there are many testimonies about life in the camps, but only partially documented - with the means of contemporary art, the exhibition unites in one immersive experience these stories that are difficult to listen to, but important for our collective memory. The Neighbours: forms of trauma (1945-1989) traces both the real experiences and the deep wounds left by the arrests and camps.
- Copyright: Krasimira Butseva, Julian Chehirian & Lilia Topouzova
- References: https://vijmag.bg/en/article/neighbours-different-reading-communist-past
Krasimira Butseva
Frequencies of Trauma, 2022.
Film
Details
- Photographer: Krasimira Butseva
- Material: Moving image
- Property of: Krasimira Butseva
- Description: Krasimira Butseva’s practice demonstrates the artist taking on the role of a social scientist – historian, anthropologist or sociologist. History is told through objects and images and the artist is an active agent in their collection, curation and preservation. The process of archiving involves active selection that is based on a story that the institution or entity is seeking to tell. In the current exhibition, Krasimira Butseva challenges the role of cultural and political institutions and their active negligence in critically examining the problematic past of the communist regime in the ongoing period of transition. Thus, metaphorically, the images presented are also in transition, incomplete, glitched, and distorted – existing in a liminal space between conflict and resolution, between fragmentation and completeness. - Text by Vasil Vladimirov
- Copyright: Krasimira Butseva
- References: https://www.dnevnik.bg/sled5/izlojbi/2022/07/04/4367298_krasimira_buceva_chestoti_na_travmata/
https://structura.gallery/bg/exhibitions/structura-project-room/
Krasimira Butseva
History is always in the making, 2021.
Photography
Details
- Photographer: Krasimira Butseva
- Material: PVC boards
- Width: 2.50 m Height: 5.00 m Depth: m
- Property of: Krasimira Butseva
- Description: The photographic installation History is always in the making interprets and re-imagines fragments of the distant and immediate past of the Largo underpass site. Through the presentation of the historical narratives intertwined in this location, I enquire into the methods and means used when writing history. The work addresses the ancient Roman settlement Serdica which existed between the 4th and the 6th century here. Alongside Targovska street, part of central 20th century Sofia where numerous businesses, merchants, coffee shops, restaurants, breweries and hotels were situated; and which was destroyed by the WWII bombing. The work moves to the changes erupted by the coup d’état – the construction of enormous buildings in Stalinist architecture, which overlook the capital in present day – initially occupied by the Ministry of Electrification, the Ministry of Heavy Industry and the headquarters of the Bulgarian Communist Party. After the fall of the communist regime in 1989, they housed the Presidency, Council of Ministers and briefly the National Assembly. This site is infused too by the abundant protests taking place across the last 32 years – demanding for a change. Alongside the tourist groups passing through the underpass and laying eyes on Sofia for the very first time, and the citizens of the capital rushing from and to the city centre.
Through the use of archival photographs from the Bulgarian State Archives and the personal archive of Borislav Skotchev, Kosmos and Paralleli magazines, Fatherland Front newspaper, a Bulgarian Guide Book from 1963, pattern designs from official Bulgarian documents, alongside 3D models, fabrications of artefacts and clusters of emojis – I attempt to create a dynamic, fluid historical outline of this complex site.
Since history is constantly being rewritten from different perspectives – literary or military one, at times through a political stance or from a specific geographical area, accounts are not fixed or firm. The need to constantly reconsider the past comes from the continual discoveries of materials, documents and artefacts. Some of which – new to the sight of the historian, while others simply neglected, destroyed or previously censored. The possibility to rethink history stems also from accessibility to materials previously unavailable or reserved in archives. The hand which inscribes the symbols of the past could produce heroes and criminals, utopias and dystopias, right and wrong. But the rewriting could demystify, deconstruct and dismantle authoritarian regimes and form new spaces for suppressed and silenced histories. - Copyright: Krasimira Butseva
- References: https://en.sofiaartprojects.com/krasimira-butseva
Krasimira Butseva
Balkan ours, 2019.
Installation
Details
- Photographer: Миша Борс
- Material: Gabardine print, wood, found photography, film
- Property of: Krasimira Butseva
- Description: Balkan ours is a three-year long study of spaces of political violence scattered across Bulgaria. I visited and documented more than fifteen of the locations of forced labour camps and mass graves from the communist regime (1946-1989). These spaces are recalled in the numerous witness testimonies of survivors, and some of them are mentioned in the Secret State Security’s archival files. But currently most of them bear almost no signifiers of their traumatic past, since the former camp buildings have been erased. In addition, there is still no official and national narrative about the political terror of the past, neither there is a memorial museum or monument of all victims of the communist system. Thus these spaces and their victims remain forgotten and absent from contemporary Bulgarian history.
- Copyright: Krasimira Butseva
- References: https://welcometokitchenconversations.podbean.com/e/kitchen-conversations-with-krasimira-butseva/