Tsvetomira Borisova

Tsvetomira Borisova is a Bulgarian contemporary artist whose practice sharply examines the relationship between the individual and their environment, and its attendant ruptures — alienation, escapism, and intimacy, the latter conceived as the very starting point of these phenomena. Her work, both conceptual and rooted in contemporary visual culture, weaves unexpected connections between psychological processes, historical narratives, mythology, and popular culture.

Across her solo exhibitions, Tsvetomira Borisova confronts psychological processes that are often "unpopular" in today's culture of hyperproductivity. Her most significant shows include "Changes" (2023), curated by Boyana Dzhikova at Charta, Sofia, which explores the decision to give up; "Gaslight, Gatekeep, Girlboss", in which she reassembles the attributes of the accomplished woman — including a leash held by the three-headed dog Cerberus; and "Death at the Dinner Table: An Exploration of the Case of Johann Schobert and the Poisonous Mushrooms" (2023, ГАРА – Sofia), examining the poisoning of the 18th-century French composer through the lens of contemporary science. She weaves together mythological figures, historical narratives, and pop culture icons — the Kennedy family, characters from the Bulgarian TV series Dunav Bridge, Dasha Nekrasova, Bella Hadid, and Grimes — to speculatively analyse and reconstruct these narratives in relation to contemporary reality.

In 2022, she was an artist-in-residence at the Sarieva Art Atelier, a residency that culminated in her first solo exhibition "Cool S", followed by "A Place to Rest" at Dupka Contemporary in Plovdiv. She has also participated in several major group exhibitions, including multiple editions of Sofia Art Week, "Market of Desire" (2021), and "View With a Room" (2023) with the POSTA collective in Berlin. In 2024, she was named laureate of the BAZA Prize — Bulgaria's most prestigious award for young contemporary artists — a recognition of a practice as rigorous as it is inventive.

As part of the Les Gardiennes de la Mer artistic residency at Résidences Rocabella, Tsvetomira Borisova engages with a new territory — the Mediterranean coastline — through the conceptual and visual tools that define her practice: the ability to make the intimate and the universal resonate, to unravel what contemporary culture prefers to leave unspoken, and to reconstruct narratives at the crossroads of myth, history, and the present.

The sea — an archetypal space of escapism and alienation, but also of origin and return — resonates directly with the founding themes of her work. Between the mythological figures that populate her installations — Cerberus, the great archetypes of femininity — and the psychological dynamics she interrogates, the Mediterranean offers her a symbolically rich terrain. This residency allows her to explore new speculative reconstructions, in which the sea becomes at once setting, character, and mirror — of an individual, a culture, an era in perpetual tension between what it celebrates and what it refuses to confront.