Boryana Petkova

Gallery / Collective

L.I.N.K. Gallery

Curator / Team

with Iskra Blagoeva

SIS is an ongoing project by artists Boryana Petkova and Iskra Blagoeva in collaboration with an evergrowing number of women. Initiated by the two artists in 2021, it grew out of a common idea in devoting time and effort in the attempt to build a new, however temporary, form of sisterhood that would connect women across generations. Materializing the invisible bond that connects women across race, nationality, and age, is a line tattooed on the body of the twenty-seven participants in the project to this date. Each of them selected and invited the next one, as a gesture of friendship and complicity. Marking the start of the SIS project was Petkova’s initiative to “correct” the interrupted lifeline of her palm by extending it with a tattoo. This act was taken up by Iskra Blagoeva who offered to continue the tattooed line on her own body as an act of trust and sharing between the two artists. More invitations followed and in 2023, the artists gathered nineteen of the participants together (many of whom didn’t know each other) with the goal of assembling their bodies into a continuous line. Without any scenography and dispensing of chronology, “the contact between these bodies was always different - sometimes the touch was gentle and the line adjusted itself, sometimes the assembly of this line required pressure, force, manipulation of the foreign body bordering on aggression” Every S.I.S. has a line tatooed on her body- the shape, size, and location of this line is a personal choice of each woman Every S.I.S. promis before being tattooed not to stop the line and to pass it on to woman(s) chosen by her. There is no time limit or limit on passing on the line. The participantes in the project are between 17 et 83 years old.