Димитрина Севова пред сървърна ферма на Фейсбук в Люлео, Швеция. Селфи: Димитрина Севова
Био
Dimitrina Sevova is an independent curator, researcher, and artist born in Bulgaria, living in Zurich. She completed CuratorLab at Konstfack – University of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm, Sweden, holds a Master of Fine Arts from the National Academy of Art, Sofia, in the painting class of Prof. Andrey Daniel, and a MAS Curating from the Institute for Cultural Studies in the Arts of the University of the Arts ZHdK, Zurich.
Her approach as a curator is research-oriented and involves a-disciplinary references, reflections and interventions across contexts, spaces and media, with a specific focus on group and collective exhibition-making that operates as an ecology of re-singularization in practices of dis-play, which presuppose co-existence. Her main interests lie in the (un)relation between representational and non-representational aesthetic forms, between languages, images and objects in their forms of displacement in the translation processes by speculative aesthetic strategies. Her curatorial approach is based on alien phenomenology and positive estrangement, and interrogates how technological dispositives and their apparatuses relate to the politics of difference and reality as a domain independent from the subject.
With this, I am trying to say that the curatorial has to be distinguished from the position of the curator and her practices. The technology of exhibition making must be thought as a process of producing an apparatus or assemblage of individuation and techniques of displacement. For me, curatorial practice resembles the bricoleur who is a kind of a jack of all trades, and yet not subordinate to any of them, as the bricoleur adapts a finite stock of materials and tools, or works with secondary quality, that is, in-between the limited positions, always at the limit, taking into account the precarious character of both the art landscape and the practical infinite plane of the curatorial, which is independent from both the curator and curatorial practices. By bricoleur, I do not mean just a collagist of do-it-yourself, or a selector and collector, but think rather of the roots of the word, the old French verb bricoler that refers to extraneous movements of the shuffling of cards, movements irrelevant or unrelated to the subject being dealt with.
Dimitrina Sevova curated Digital Ecologies 2018-2019, Plovdiv, Bulgaria: an international exhibition project in two folds. Fold II, 2019. Digital Dramatizations: Ecologies from the Future (04 May - 30 June 2019; with a symposium on 05/06 May 2019). Fold I, 2018. Operaismo Naturale: Ecology of the Event (27 July - 05 September 2018). Part of the official program of Plovdiv European Capital of Culture 2019. Runs, with Alan Roth, the experimental platform for contemporary art Corner College in Zurich (2015-), which until 2018 was a physical exhibition space for experimental and contemporary art – a discursive, event-oriented platform in combination with group and thematic exhibitions like Cold. War. Hot. Stars. The Iron(y) Helmet of the Intellect in 2016, Spooky Action at a Distance (Artes Mechanicae and Witch's Cradle) in 2015 (curated in collaboration with Gabriel Gee), and personal exhibitions like Martina-Sofie Wildberger, Nicole Bachmann, Uriel Orlow and others. Sinopale 5 (Sinop Biennale) under the title, Clusters and Crystals: Observing at Point Zero, co-curated with T. Melih Görgün, Emre Zeytinoğlu, Aslı Çetinkaya, Işın Önol, Elke Falat, in Sinop, Turkey in 2014 (several issues of Sinopsis newspaper in Turkish and English); as a guest lecturer in the Bachelor program of Fine Arts she curated Kunsthof Zürich in 2013, where she developed an trans-disciplinary project consisting of a platform of irregular non-serial events, screenings, public readings, performances, talks, urban interventions and other ephemera, on the theme of Opportunities for Outdoor Play? Playgrounds – New Spaces of Liberty (The Question of Form), and curated, in cooperation with Christoph Brunner, the international public symposium The Diagrammatic Practice of the Micropolitical – the Spatio‐temporal Expression of Play between Power, Knowledge and the Aesthetics of Existence at ZHdK; Sinopale 4 (Sinop Biennale) under the title, Wisdom of Shadow: Art in the Era of Corrupted Information, co-curated with Işın Önol, Aslı Çetinkaya and Elke Falat in Sinop, Turkey in 2012; Reality Manifestos – Can Reality Break Bricks?, a group show and public theoretical symposium at Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna in 2012; among many other curatorial projects.