Meeting Point Platform for young artists and contemporary art presents Leda Vaneva’s solo exhibition.

What do the octopus, the fly and passport control kiosks at airports, for example, share in common? Probably this line of associations can be extended so that the answer can become inevitably clear, although it is too general – the ultraviolet rays. Leda Vaneva’s exhibition comprises similar, at first sight, strange and distant associations, which cross the borders of the physical and social world to remind us that the Earth is much bigger and more unfamiliar than we imagine in our everyday life.

The works explore the possibilities – “What if” – human perceptions were different. For instance, what if we could see the UV rays like flies or through our skin like octopuses, or see the world in black and white like dogs, or move faster like insects, or if … and why not – turn the rays of the northern lights into an object whose permanent shape we can explore with a touch. The imagination about this “what if” is embodied in each of the works that express the limits of the human sight through artistic and technical means, which at the same time is a centre shift. Thus the artist is engaged in and in her own way de-centres perhaps the most sustainable notion in the western culture since the Renaissance: that namely the human abilities, mind and perceptions form the basis of the world, that they are the ones which describe, define and determine it.

Leda Vaneva (born in 1985) lives and works in Helsinki, where she is currently studying New Media. Prior to that, she was a student at the National Academy of Arts in Sofia, where she was interested in work with porcelain and glass, as well as photography. In her works, she uses different media and pays attention to the meaning that each one of them adds to the concept. In 2014, Leda Vaneva was nominated for the BAZA Award, and a year earlier (in 2013) won the ESSL Art Award Bulgaria. She has participated in various exhibitions, among which the Aalto Festival (Finland, 2015), Media Intervention in the City (Finland, 2015), the European month of photography (Bulgaria, 2014), The more… the more (Bulgaria, 2014), Тranscending cultures (Austria, 2013), Anonymous Drawings (Germany, 2013), Camera Obscura (Spain, 2012), etc.

Special thanks to Aalto Fablab, ADD Lab and Art Express

The Meeting Point Platform for young artists and contemporary art and the Sculpture program of The Vaska Emanouilova Gallery are supported by Societe Generale EXPRESSBANK WE SUCCEED TOGETHER.