Daniela Zaharieva is a London-based digital artist who primarily works in a video format, which varies between filming real environments and creating virtual worlds. With a specific interest in non-linear story-telling, her work often challenges people to look at a situation or an issue from a different perspective. She has most recently focused on creating immersive experiences that investigate psychological spaces and alternative realities, through the human psyche. Her projects also use diverse methods of delivering these experiences, such as projection, sculpture, VR, sound and installation.
Her most recent work Borders (2021), exhibited at /unreel, is a dive into the invisible boundaries that exist between different realms of existence. She situates characters in distinctly other worlds and confines them within, making it uneasy for the viewer to observe as they become entrapped in an ever ending loop of unreality. Daniela’s work often treats time as a matter to be altered. Reshaping time through repetition or stillness is a way of questioning the rules assigned to it and the reality that comes with them. This rearrangement of time in a way exposes the unstable line between the physical and psychological reality or what some may call unreality.
The main objective of her work is to lead people into a lived experience of a new intangible world which heightens their senses and challenges their perspective reality. Meanwhile the artwork she produces is always fluid and open to unique interpretation of the viewer as they become a part of the environment and join the protagonist on their journey/s.
artist statement inspirations Phoebe Collings-James & Laura Hindmarsh