Marina Vasileva

Graphic & Interaction Design

THE GAZE

I am Marina Vasileva a conceptual artist from Sofia, Bulgaria, working across photography, art direction, styling, and graphic design.

Through staged photographic scenes, masks, mirrors, fashion, and constructed bodies, my graduation project examines the tension between beauty and vulnerability, investigates what remains of identity once the performance begins to collapse.

Influenced by personal experience, outer observations and contemporary visual culture, the work reflects on how individuals learn to perform, conceal, and reshape themselves in order to survive within systems of visibility and emotional consumption. The anonymous gaze of social norms, one that erases individuality, suppresses uniqueness, and judges through standards we unconsciously absorb while growing up... I question why femininity, emotional sensitivity, beauty, and self-expression are so often misunderstood as weakness, superficiality, or provocation. For me visibility is not a submission, but as resistance. It explores the experience of existing under constant observation in contemporary society and reflects upon the topics about “beauty as a pain,” and “beauty as a weapon” through a woman’s perspective.

Even in solitude, this gaze remains within us, influencing our thoughts and actions, mostly projected by our lovers,families and social circles. For me, emancipation is not only the removal of external restrictions, but first the liberation from this internalized, anonymous, and controlling gaze. This project is dedicated to that painful process of inner self-liberation and the pursuit of personal autonomy.

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