Pretend you're happy when you're blue is a solo exhibition by Bulgarian photographer Albena Nikolova, currently active in Rome. The exhibition lingers on her artistic research in recent years, proposing a different look at her works through the filter and tension of the Prussian blue of the cyanotype. In fact, these works suggest to us how our perception of reality can undergo significant changes when we "simply" choose a photographic development method different from what we are used to. The author ruminates on what has already been to propose it to us again in view of what could have been and what could be.
In fact, rather than offering us definitive resolution possibilities, the works aim to amplify the internal contradictions, in which we lose the understanding of what we see, what we feel and what the photographer herself intends to convey.
Albena Nikolova was born in 1986 in Veliko Tărnovo, Bulgaria, and lives and works as a graphic designer and photographer in Rome, Italy. She studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Veliko Tărnovo in Visual Arts, and at the University of Rome “La Sapienza, with a master's degree in Design, Visual Communication and Graphic Multimedia. In her artistic research she experiments with the fusion of digital techniques with analogue ones and photographic printing with silver and iron salts.