Having first trained in applied arts and textile design, Rada Boukova studied stage design (theatre and cinema) at the National Academy of Arts in Sofia. Between 1995 and 1997, she created theatre sets and costumes for Bulgarian national theatre performances. In 1997, her training complete, the artist enrolled in the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris, graduating in 2002. She has lived and worked in Paris ever since.
R. Boukova grew up in the People’s Republic of Bulgaria and lived through the fall of the Eastern bloc. This moment of passage, between one world to another, would profoundly mark her work: she unrelentingly probes for signs and changes as manifested in the materials of daily life. The work Still Life (2009), for instance, displays Mylar celebration balloons, an embodiment of the values of our capitalist society. On this festive battlefield, depending on time and place, the balloon incarnating football may rise above that of religion, money or food.

The artist is fascinated by the transformation of cultural elements, their passage from one signification to another. Bikini (2009), composed of three cardboard triangles, reduces the female body to a schema of two breasts and a pubis. If we raise up that lower triangle, we end up with the symbol for radioactivity, in an echo of the nuclear testing carried out by the United Stateson Bikini Atoll in 1946.
In the series Horizon, started in 2011, the artist once again uses the bin bag as her raw material. As a child she collected plastic bags brought home from abroad, ambassadors of Western culture. Meticulously folded and framed, here they become landscapes and ocean sunsets. This experiment in the deconditioning of thought agitates what we hold as certain, revealing, beneath an apparent simplicity, a multiplicity of meaning.
Between signifiers and characters, objects in their rudimentary forms also populate R. Boukova’s video work. In 2007 she filmed the rotating motion of Ballerine, a fairground carousel. The slowed motion of the image and music reveals the superficial, excessive nature of this machine, plunging us into a dark fairground fantasy.
Composing her work from what she finds around her, R. Boukova sometimes appropriates objects made by her loved ones. Lumière (2013) and How We Might Live (2018) show her artist father’s experiments in stained glass. Couleur bleue (2012) presents her son’s drawings alongside a baguette-shaped illuminated sign. Installed in the gallery, this formulation reconstructs the idea of a family home as centered around bread and fire. The artist’s use of the exhibition medium has recently given way to a more narrative form, as seen with the theatre project Au Anagrama (2023) on the subject of gold extraction.

R. Boukova has participated in numerous exhibitions in France, notably at the Palais de Tokyo, and internationally, including at the Kunsthalle Bratislava and the Mudac de Lausanne. She is also a curator, and has been part of several collaborations. These include her work How We Live, created alongside Lazar Lyutakov (born 1977) as Bulgaria’s contribution to the 2019 Venice Biennale. In the exhibition at the Palazzo Lolin, the artists set up a dialogue between framed insulation panels and glasses made from recycled waste from Hanoi. The materialistic and political dimensions of How We Live provoked fierce debate in Bulgaria. Works by R. Boukova are held in public and private collections in Europe and Turkey (René Block, Vehbi Koç Foundation, etc.).