NINA Kovacheva

NINA Kovacheva is a versatile artist. Her work goes beyond the confines of a single medium. She taps into, and often blends, the resources of video, video installations, photography and drawing, amongst others. What has also added complexity to her artistic career is a long and fruitful cooperation with Valentin Stefanoff, especially in a number of video installations in public spaces.

One of the most notable distinctive features of Nina’s art is her abiding interest in the body as an object whose wholeness will always slip out of the artist’s grasp. If we choose to pun on Deleuze and Guattari’s construct of the nonproductive “body without organs”, we should say that Nina is exhilarated by the production and re-production of “organs without bodies”. In many of her most powerful photos, for example, we are given strikingly profound vistas of body parts. Actually, most of these shots accommodate conflicting sides of existence which cannot possibly do without each other: male and female; nature and culture; life and death. A dainty female hand, with nails deliberately polished in bright red, has locked in its grip a helpless male organ. Male and female feet stand, as it were, at cross-purposes, and yet overlap in funny configurations. A cupped female hand has sheltered the dead body of a locust, while a tiny yet robust doll figure is intently walking towards the hand. We, the beholders, feel that these pictures have an awful lot to say, but the reconstruction of meaning(s) is left to us.

With her latest series of drawings, Nina seems to have struck out in a somewhat new direction. Without sacrificing the sophistication of the message, she seems eager to add a more direct social sting in the tail of her pictures. Take, for instance, the fragile young girl who would rather embrace a bomb than play with her ballerina toy. This figure stands as an absurdly beautiful admonition against a world in which the image of violence has been airbrushed to look like a children’s game. Such pictures tell us that while the artist still believes that “beauty is truth and truth – beauty”, she also wants her art to gently raise political awareness.               

http://nina.ninavale.com/