PHASED

Boyana Aleksova

BA (Hons) Fine Art, Yr3
Boyana Aleksova www.boyanaaleksova.com www.instagram.com/boyana.aleksova www.facebook.com/boyanaaleksovaart boyana.aleksova.art@gmail.com
BA (Hons) Fine Art, Yr3
2021
#MA Courses
#MA Fine Art
#Participatory Art

Work statement

Boyana Aleksova’s eco-activist art practice brings attention to environmental issues through playful processes of art making, socially engaged participatory events and visual art publications.

The artist led a collaborative eco-activist performance that took place on 12 June 2021 at the river Struma in Novi Chiflik, Kyustendil, Bulgaria, bringing together 40 volunteers from diverse backgrounds. They worked to free three kilometres of the river’s coast from plastic waste, which were tangled in trees, bushes and drowned in the river herself. This amass of refuse is said to have been brought downstream in February 2021, due to a high rise of the level of Struma as a result of heavy rains. With the rise, she collected tons of waste from illegal landfills that locals created near the river, including a large illegal landfill formed by the Nevestino Council in 2020.

The volunteers collected 150 bags of waste over a period of four hours, subsequently loading the accumulated debris onto a lorry, returning it back to its’ origins in Kyustendil. Here it was parked in the middle of the town square for an hour, for locals to see and acknowledge their gathered waste.

For Us raised awareness about pollution and acted as a call for action, yet, through connective aesthetics, it brought like-minded people together who built relationships while creating art. Thus, the art was not in the creation of physical work, but rather, the encounter between each participant with others, animals and nature, became the art itself.

This event was later recorded in Aleksova’s second artist publication ‘For Us’.

PHASED

The annual Degree Show is a highly anticipated event amongst staff, students, external partners and friends of the School of Art – it provides a platform for the work that the students have spent so long conceiving and producing. The 2023 Degree Show has been realised through an ongoing testing of ideas in public arenas in which the discourse around art practice takes place. This process of realising practice which engages with audiences has over […]

Peers & Collaborators

Xirui Zhao
Xirui Zhao
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Jiayue Ding
Jiayue Ding
PHASED
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Erum Naz
Erum Naz
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#MA Art and Design Interdisciplinary Practices #MA Courses
David Dosunmu
Beth Derbyshire
Everything that is necessary is possible.
#MA Arts and Project Management #MA Courses