EXHIBITION: ARE YOU A MODERN GIRL? RITUALS & NOWNESS
Artists: Juno Calypso, Otucha Collective, Veronika Desova, Sofia Dimova, Gery Georgieva
Curated by Boyana Dzhikova
OPENING: 16/04/2025, 17.00, with a performance by Otucha Collective
The exhibition presents several artistic interpretations on the topic of rituals and nowness, mostly through the prism of women’s experience (though not limited to it). It questions the modern woman and her attributes and the role that ritual plays in her life.
“Are you a modern girl? Rituals & Nowness” explores the way rituals are commodified and refracted in the present, problematizing the need of them, the result of their commodification, and the possibility of them becoming dangerous if not handled with care. The exhibition considers rituals in their multilayeredness, as a means of making sense of time and life cycles, but also as phenomena that sometimes need to be radically rejected. “Are you a modern girl” is a dissection of the fabric of everyday life through the seemingly invisible aspects in which rituals are present. Through photography, video, sculpture and performance, the exhibition presents different perspectives on the disappearance, transformation and persistence of rituals in contemporary society. The starting point for its understanding is the relationship between our new models of communication, work and the economic structures which we inhabit, as institutes of anxiety and alienation, and rituals as a potential means of “making a home” out of the world.
The lone figure in all of Juno Calypso’s images is her: she photographs herself in couples-only motels, abandoned underground bunkers and heart-shaped hot tubs. Across film, photography and installation, Calypso builds a soft pink universe of femininity, solitude, desire and despair, all with an ultra-critical edge. In the process, she’s become one of the most recognisable photographers working today, forging a totally unique aesthetic that has seen her move seamlessly from immersive, intimate gallery exhibitions to leading major fashion campaigns. Calypso’s art is deeply sinister, hyper-feminine and filled with humour. This is cinematic, introspective art for the age of the self and the selfie.
– Eddy Frankel, Time Out
Veronika Desova is a Bulgarian multimedia artist, architect and educator. Her practice explores the intrinsic relationship between the spaces we inhabit and our bodies, the ways architecture and ourselves could coalesce through the medium of photography, painting and sculpture, and began at the Glasgow School of Art where she studied architecture.Her work often draws inspiration from the aesthetics of late Romanticism and its enquiry into the sublime through using the immersive and ethereal properties of mist and scent, and in photography, by employing the use of slow and double exposure, blurring and various other methods of image distortion, and focus on the ephemeral aspects of the human body in movement, nature and light.
Sofia Dimova (1996) is a multidisciplinary artist, born in Varna. She graduated from Minerva Academy (Groningen, The Netherlands) with a degree in Fine Arts in 2019. In her practice, Sofia combines different materials and techniques that help her to create an interconnection between personal, fundamental and socio-political issues that seek content and message beyond the classical aesthetics. Since her return to Bulgaria in 2020, Sofia Dimova has had five solo exhibitions and participated in over twenty group exhibitions, including in cities like Munich, Paris, Glasgow, Prague and Pristina.
Gery Georgieva studied Fine Art/History of Art at Goldsmiths College.Georgieva’s work encompasses video, performance, multimedia installations and occasional musical collaborations (under her stage name Vera Modena).Creating lo-fi assemblages and film sets in her studio for performative to-camera improvisations, she uses the immediacy of her own body as material to consider the construction of authenticity, taste and belonging. DIY glamour and an elaborate layering of references across costume, props and set create an ambiguous cultural vernacular often rooted in pop music, showbiz and traditional folk heritage. Revealing moments that capture the promise of empowerment, often constructed and filtered through multifarious layers of digital appropriation and mainstream manipulation, Georgieva examines how we configure and re-configure our cultural identities.
Otucha Collective ( (Velizara Karaivanova, Agnieszka Kucharska, Dorota Michalak, Ola Zielińska) is a vocal ensemble which place their interest in explorations healing & empowering qualitiesof the human voice in the contexts of social relations, community building and environment. They mainly workwith vocal traditions of rural areas of Eastern Europe, called white singing or open throat singing and somaticpractices.They do performative and public interventions, offering workshops and holding safe spaces for sharing experien-ce of a deep, transforming togetherness in collective sound flow.
Officially formed in February 2022 with their first public sonic intervention in a response for Russian invasionon Ukraine, inviting the crowd for communal singing of Zelenay Wishnia, a song of origins from Lugansk Area.They shared their practices in various places, such as IMPULS festival für Neue Musik (Halle/Deassau), MarketSouls for Music. A festival for street music and rhythm of crowds attuned with solidarity (Berlin), In.habit.antsfestival (Phelitz, Brandenburg), Flora Pondtemporary (St. Florian, Austria) and co-creating projects Who’d have thought that snow falls – video choir sound installation (Berlin, Podstam, Frankfurt), Treehumana – concert instal-lation (Berlin), Sensing the River – SpreeBerlin+Spore Initiative (Berlin), OderHive (Stolpe/Angermuende).