 My name is Buriana Rosa, and I'm a Bulgarian artist. Currently, I live in Upstate New York for at least two years, or maybe more, I don't know, but I'm originally from Bulgaria. So I'm very much attached to the culture of the female emancipation that was realized. So those are the three important things in my art that determine, that shape my art. The first thing, especially from the feminist point of view, is the female emancipation. And I'm going to talk more about the Russian Bulgaria because I'm more familiar with these two countries. The second theme is the body and its liquids and its wholeness. I work a lot with my body, you will see this. And the third one is biotechnologies and the body as a construct rather than being static. So here, this is a little introduction to the female emancipation in the communist countries, which are already post-communist. So what happened and what is a crucial difference comparing to the Western feminism is that the female emancipation was conducted by the state immediate and it was an immediate process. I'm going to read this to save time. So female emancipation in Eastern Europe was immediate and conducted by the state. It came together with the communist ideology and it was part of it, as opposed to the feminist movements in other countries that are gradually achieving women's rights. The female emancipation was also futuristic with the goal to create the new human, not a new woman only, but the new human, who will not be concerned with the old concepts of property, imperialism or racial, gender and nationalist discrimination, but will rather be a creative person who conquers the cosmos for the sake of prosperity of all humanity, not only for women again. So the person, the woman who was actually the ideologies of the female emancipation in Russia after the Bolshevik revolution is Aleksandra Koluntai and she was the most prominent woman in the Soviet administration after the revolution, as I said. So as you see this poster, this is her and on your right is, sorry, is this poster that proclaims or speaks about the working woman who is the builder of, working emancipated woman who is building socialism. So I have to, I would like to emphasize on the fact that the word feminism was not used, not because we didn't have information what feminism is because of the iron curtain or something like this, but it was, the word feminism was charged with some meaning which was not proper to name the struggle of the working women. Instead it was associated with female separatism and with the female emancipation ideologized or being part of the movement of the bourgeoisie for jets. And here I'm going to read a little part of the Aleksandra Koluntai's autobiography of sexually emancipated communist woman. And this is when, this is just before the revolution when she was creating a group of the working women who has to be presented in the parliament and work towards the female emancipation. I worked with Mike and Main to assure that our women workers who were to participate in the Congress emerged as an independent and distinct group. I managed to carry out this plan, but not without opposition. My party comrades accused me and those women comrades who shared my views of being feminists and of placing too much emphasis on matters of concern of women only. At the time there was still no comprehension at all of the extraordinary important role in the struggle devolving upon self-employed professional women. Nevertheless, our will prevailed. A women workers group came forward at the Congress in St. Petersburg with its own program and it drew a clear line of demarcation between the bourgeoisie of jets and the women's liberation movement of the working class in Russia. So these differences are very, people are not really familiar with this and unfortunately the misinterpretation or misunderstanding of the female emancipation in Eastern Europe just contains or sustains the misinterpretation of the feminist art or the art made by women. And now in the 90s we began using the word feminism which is already charged with some other meanings and with the whole history of the feminist movements all over the world in the 70s. So it doesn't have the same meaning so that's why we began using it. But nevertheless after the coming democracy came actually together with consumerism. And so with consumerism there are some issues of the way how a woman can be presented already as an object or already as something that can be both instead of working creative woman. So this video, you probably saw it, this video is connected with time and to me it is a way to represent the immediate changes that can happen just in a second. Sometimes we can just hang out for hours and hours somewhere and nothing can happen to us but sometimes something really crucial in our life can happen just in a second. So here this video represents actually it is a video which is made out of 30 seconds video footage and I split the second into little frames and going back and forth I in a way stretched the time and put more attention, focused on the way how these faces change. And so this is kind of a reference to the period of my teenagers when I was going through all these changes in our society. So here this is another series of photos that I made in the 90s and it represents the crisis of the female identity after the end of the communism and after the end of the female emancipation ideology let's say like this. So as I said women decided that they can be paid because just because they are beautiful and there are many women who think that actually I'm so beautiful that I don't want to go to university and I don't want to go to work I would rather stay at home and be paid by my sugar daddy or my husband or whoever and this is what I really want and this is something that the communists were not giving me permission to do. So but to me this is a crisis. So my beautiful woman on the front is actually this new female identity that was not familiar to our countries before the end of the communism and on the back this is a woman who has okay this is the name of the work is the good, the bad and the ugly and as far as we have genders in our language so it is if we translate it from Bulgarian it is the good woman, the bad woman and the ugly man. So the identity of the woman on the background is kind of not really determined yet because the issues of homosexuality and queer in general were not really developed or not really talked about until the end of the 80s although there are elements of it especially in the image of the emancipated woman which is very queer image which is very men-like, boys-like, active woman. So yeah there is a woman who on the background fights with a man and another one who doesn't fight who she's just paid. This is a video that probably I'll show later and this is one of my first video works. I just, I'm worried about the time so I have to talk about many other things and maybe I'll play it at the end if I have time. So the second thing, the body and its liquids warmth and wholeness. I work a lot with my body and a lot with surgical intervention on it. So here this is a performance that I made and I have a lot of photo documentation and video documentation and what I did here is that I stitched up myself to my mirror image with surgical needles and thread. And from just mentioning Locale here this is a perfect example of how to put together the imaginary, the symbolic and the real and where the real is. The real is actually in between the mirror image and the real image and to me the real is the stitch which is pretty utopian and pretty unconceivable. Something that you can't really materialize and you can't really touch and it is kind of painful. So this is a metaphor of Lacan. This is a little bit of a video from it that I'll probably show later and now I'm going towards another performance that I just did at Exit Art here in New York City when I was already here. So if there are some performance artists here around they probably know the myth about the Rudolf Schwarzkogler who cut his penis off and he died out of it but this is a myth and he's a representative of the Venice... I'm sorry, probably I'm not pronouncing it correctly but Venice Axionism. People from Vienna, not Venice. So what I did here is that I actually reproduced what he did is that he didn't make a live performance he just made a photo series and on the basis of the photo series this myth exists as a ultimate representation of the performance artist's heroism. And so I decided because it is a myth I decided to reproduce it through photography but also as a live performance. So I did a live performance and I stitched up this dildo to my belly. Of course I don't have a penis to cut off so I had to replace it with something but it had to be physical so that's why I stitched it up to my skin. I asked the public, the audience to take pictures of me doing this and reproducing the mythological photos that Rudolf Schwarzkogler did. So this is one of his castration photos for which he actually used the fish. And so you see this is the other photo that somebody from the audience did. This is another one. And the first one that I showed, okay this is another one and I'm bonding this thing to my body. The first picture is not really reproduction of his photos but this was a picture that was taken by a woman from the audience and she said it is very beautiful from this side. I want to take this picture. So this is the end of this performance and now I'm going to talk a little bit more about the body at the end because this connected with my last performance but I want to also mention another very, very, very important part of my work which is science and technology in conjunction with art and all social and ethical topics that are raised by the development of science and technology. So here I participated in a collaborative project which is a Cyborgian project. This is a robot that is created, actually it has a biological brain which is created out of mice, neurons, cells, brain cells that through electrodes it controls the robotic arm and this entity makes drawings. The interesting thing about this project from a feminist point of view is that this body was created without any notion of gender. None of the scientists or artists who participated in this project have ever thought that we are going to make this robot to be female or male or hemophrodite or something else. This is just an entity which is alive, intelligent but it doesn't have any gender determination. So here it is me. I have some hands-on experience in bio-lab and this is very important for artists who deal with bio-art and this is another performance that I did as a reference to the genderless type of thinking or construction of biological body. What I did here is that I stitched up my vulva and again with stitches, with surgical needles. So this was my symbolic gesture to represent the idea of the genderless body, the body that will probably, we are going to create in the future and it will change, it will be a revolutionary change in our thought thinking about gender. And my last performance, okay, this is another thing, we stitched up together with my partner, Oleg Movrumati, who sits over there who is really, really great help for me for all of my ideas and all of his ideas because they are collective. So we stitched up together and this is again an exit art and we tried to walk together stitched up. It was very, very hard. This is my last performance and I'm going to end up with this. This is my thesis work. I'm graduating from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the master's degree in electronic arts. So what I did here is that I was thinking again about my body as a whole thing without dismissing or just trying to erase the difference between or the separation between two mirror parts of the body. So I stitched up myself, me to myself. I, so as you see, Oleg is helping me. There are many people documenting it and so all these photos, again, this is another element that I didn't talk about but this is an important thing that the people from the audience they are making documentation of our works, of our performances. So those are more pictures of it and the person who documents it is always a part of the performance itself which is also not very typical for most of the performance artists who try to separate the audience from them. I want to have the audience touching my body. I want to have the audience seeing my body through the frame and creating their own myth about me or about whatever they think I'm doing through the pictures that they are taking. So those are many pictures taken from the people from the audience and as you see my body is stitched up over there and I sit on a mirror which is another symbol that I'm obviously using for most of my work. I think I'm going to end up and I guess people can ask me questions later on, not here. Thank you.