Boryana Rossa

Biography

On 18 January 2003, at the Sakharov Center in Moscow, almost all the exhibits in the show “Beware, Religion!” were damaged, destroyed or stolen: the centre had been attacked by Orthodox activists. Among the works that suffered was Boryana Rossa’s photograph “Fountain”, in which an ermine crowns a sculptural group on a biblical subject. The print was torn and covered with paint. She had worked on the exhibition together with Oleg Mavromatti.

Boryana Rossa was born on 21 June 1972 in Sofia; at birth her name was Boryana Dimitrova Drageova. In 1997 she graduated from the National Academy of Art in Sofia, with a degree in mural painting. As far as one can tell from the list of her projects, she afterwards did almost no work in that field.

In 2004 she joined the group Ultrafuturo together with Mavromatti; its other members were Katya Damyanova, Anton Terziev, Miroslav Dimitrov and Stanislav Ganchev. That same year Rossa and Mavromatti wrote the “Ultrafuturo Manifesto”, a programmatic text of radical transhumanism, together with a number of other documents on transhumanism, immortalism and roboethics. Two films were made at this time: “Ultrafuturo Manifesto”, with quotations from these texts, and “MEART and the Snowflake”, about cryonics, Robert Ettinger and a project to freeze brain cells. She met Ettinger in 2006 at the Cryonics Institute in Michigan and made a documentary film about him. In the same year she took part in the tenth seminar on transhumanism and scientific immortalism at the Institute for African Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences and became editor of the Bulgarian transhumanist magazine “UMVELT”. Her performances of these years were mostly done in tandem with Mavromatti: “The Last Valve” (Sofia, 2004), “Performance of the International Group for the Liberation of Robots” (M’ARS Gallery, Moscow, 2005), “Before and After” at Exit Art in New York and “Babel Fish” at the General Electric Museum (both 2006), and “On the Living and the Dead” in Quebec (2006). In 2008 the performance “Anti-Halloween” took place at the Art Hall in Tallinn. In 2009 came “Servants of the People” at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, “Vitruvian Body” at the Academy of Arts in Berlin and “Rotte Armie Forever” at the Reichstag in Berlin. Rossa produced all of Mavromatti’s films made under the “Post-cinema” manifesto.

In 2007 she received a master’s degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the United States, and in 2012 she defended a doctoral dissertation there in digital art. In 2009 at Exit Art in New York she curated the transhumanist project “Corpus Extremus, Life +”.

The year 2012 brought several events at once. From that year she has been a professor at Syracuse University, where she later taught video art in the Department of Film and Media Arts. In August, together with the writer Marina Galperina and the artist Angela Washko, she staged an action in Harlem in support of Pussy Riot. In November, with Stanimir Panayotov, she curated the contemporary art festival Sofia Queer Forum. The same year saw the release of the film “After the Fall”, about gender issues in the Soviet and post-Soviet era, and she and Mavromatti showed the projects “Common Frequency” at the Radiator gallery in New York and “Apocalypse in Chinatown” at ART-DEPO M-TEL in Sofia. A year earlier their project “Civil Position” had been held at the gallery of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Sofia.

Her work has been shown at the National Gallery of Fine Arts in Sofia, the Goethe-Institut, the Moscow Biennale, the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, Exit Art, the Biennial for Electronic Art in Perth and the Foundation for Art and Creative Technologies in Liverpool. She has received the Gaudenz B. Ruf Award for New Bulgarian Art, the Essential Reading for Art Writers Award from the Institute of Contemporary Art in Sofia and, in 2014, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in digital and electronic arts. She lives and works in Bulgaria and the United States.