More than 20 women were killed by men from their immediate environment in Bulgaria in 2023 and the registered cases of domestic violence were 1359 compared to 749 in 2022. "The increase in acts of aggression in domestic conditions last year was 81.4%, which is extremely disturbing," said the Chief Secretary of the Ministry of Interior, Zhivko Kotsev, some time ago. The situation in Bulgaria has not changed significantly in recent months. After the public protests of the summer of 2023, however, we began speaking more openly about violence against women, which is also the reason for the large number of reports filed to the law enforcement authorities. But the road is long and the state and society must walk hand in hand along it.
"In recent years, I've been trying to change the world around me with what I do best – art. Through my vision of an artists I want to make the world a better place"
This is what poster artist Radoslava Boor, who has been living and working in Prague for 18 years, told us exactly one year ago as the occasion was her exhibition "We are Earth". The attempt to achieve change through art continues, but today the Bulgarian and her Czech colleague Jitka Zárubová are already at the head of ARTtention. This is curatorial project that aims to collect artworks with a strong social message from artists around the world. And the first major exhibition with posters, which will be presented in May this year in the Czech Republic, is on the topic of "Women's Rights".
After receiving the opportunity to apply and personal invitations from the two curators, 347 artists from 49 countries responded to the idea and sent 678 posters related to the topic of women's rights and violence against them. This topic is relevant for today's world and has a different nuance in every country, Jitka and Radoslava say.
"All countries, even the more advanced ones in Europe, have problems and they haven't gone away. These are not just problems of The Women, Life, Freedom movement in Iran or the women protesting for abortion rights in Poland or USA. And because both myself and my colleague in this venture, Jitka Zárubová, are women and we have daughters, we responded to this strong theme and provoked artists - men and women, to react to it. I tried to direct them to look at the topic from their own point of view, towards the country they live in and through the system that has affected them most personally. I believe that when someone feels something sincerely, then it can be seen in the poster and in their art."
Each artist had the right to send up to three works on the topic and answer the question - Why did you make this poster?
"Many of them reacted in a very interesting way. For example, we have an artist who said she has personally experienced violence. We have an artist who wrote that he did a survey among women about how many of them had experienced some form of harassment or sexual assault. And he was surprised that half of the women told him they had experienced some form of harassment. That's why he made his poster."
Radoslava also told us about the work of Serbian artist Luka Prstojevic, an assistant in the Art Academy of Novi Sad. His poster carries the message: “I got tired of only seeing women as victims on posters, so I decided to approach a bit differently, to show the feminine strength and a way to rebel.”
150 posters will be shown at the exhibition, as 50 of them will be printed and 100 will be projected, Radoslava Boor tells Radio Bulgaria.
The whole variety of viewpoints towards the woman can be seen from May 7 to 24th in the gallery of the Bulgarian Cultural Institute in the center of Prague and from May 28 to July 28 in the Czech National Library of Technology. Next spring, the "Women's Rights" exhibition will also open the International Poster Triennial in Sofia. Bulgaria is represented through the works of Lyuba Tomova, Ivan Kashlakov and Zlatan Dryanov.
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Publication in English: Al. Markov
Photos: Facebook /ARTtention, Facebook / Radoslava Boor
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