Natalia Ivanova
Artist | Curator | Writer | Radio Host | Creative Strategist
Natalia Ivanova is an American-Bulgarian artist, curator, writer, and cultural instigator working across contemporary art, independent media, performance, and experimental publishing. She is the founder and director of Art Agency Reframed in New York City’s Chinatown, co-founder and co-editor of SENSUM Fanzine, and co-host of SENSUM Air, a monthly radio show on 8ball Radio.
With more than 25 years in the contemporary art field, Natalia has built a practice that moves between institutions and independent spaces, critical writing and artistic experimentation, curatorial projects and live performance. Her work has been presented and exhibited in New York and internationally. She previously served as Executive Director and Chief Curator of Pro Arts Gallery & COMMONS in Oakland for a decade and has held positions at MoMA PS1, Redhouse Arts Center, and Flux Digital Art Space.
A co-founder of the art collective Dadais Americanus, she explores the commons, intellectual property, fair labor, and alternative cultural economies through writing, collaborative practice, and public programming. Her publications include Reframing the Value of Art and Fair Labor in the Context of a Sharing Economy and, with Marc Herbst, The Commons: Of Friends & Lovers.
Moving between radio, art, sound, text, and performance, Natalia brings an independent voice and an artist’s sensibility to contemporary culture, creating spaces for exchange beyond conventional institutional and commercial frameworks.
nataliaivanova2.substack.com
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DADAIS AMERICANUS Art Collective
Dadais Americanus is a constellation of artists operating at the intersection of art, law, and economy. Their work advances a structural and poetic reframing of authorship, ownership, and
value through collective actions that occupy intellectual territory to spark new connections between artist, institution, and audience. Central to the collective's practice is the PPAC Art License, an alternative licensing framework integrating commoning principles, moral clauses,
and relational provisions into copyright agreements: an instrument that enables artists to encode ethical commitments directly into the circulation of their work.
GALLERY EXHIBITION
Natalia Ivanova & Oskar Malone Pëyak
Duality Is Overrated: Act I, 2022
Single-channel video, color, sound
2 min. 24 sec.
Duality Is Overrated: Act I is a poetic meditation on the binaries that have long shaped the ways we see, desire, identify, and understand one another.
The work asks what happens when we interrupt those inherited patterns: cut, break, reframe the gaze, and release the desire to possess either/or.
Rather than choosing one side or becoming legible as the other, the work lingers in the unstable space between. A space where oppositions begin to dissolve, perception slips, and identity is no longer required to resolve itself.
Act I is an invitation to stay with the in-between, to inhabit the now before it hardens into another category.
Natalia Ivanova is a Bulgarian-American artist, writer, curator, and cultural critic based in New York. Her interdisciplinary practice moves between moving image, writing, curatorial projects, and experimental forms of art production. Her work explores perception, identity, desire, systems of value, and the spaces between opposing structures, often questioning the binaries through which contemporary experience is framed.
Say hello// @andnat @art_agency_reframed
https://artagencyreframed.com/
Oskar Malone Pëyak is a multidisciplinary art worker and visual arts educator based in the San Francisco Bay Area. His practice moves fluidly between image-making, video art, installation, mixed media, two-dimensional drawing, and archival exploration—often reflecting on memory, identity, and the poetics of place. Oskar earned an MFA in Photography from the San Francisco Art Institute and has studied independently under influential artists including Maria Magda Campos Pons, Mary Ellen Mark, John Powell, and Sarah Sze.
He has shaped a practice rooted in both intimacy and experimentation with a deep respect for storytelling, materiality, and the quiet resonance of overlooked histories.
memory as architecture//
the grittier cross-elements between the atlantic and pacific regions
from under the scorching welts by whippings from the antebellum scorned sun
to the piers of a piteous city fog of unsounded mists and broken dreams.
say hello//@shiveringnerve
SENSUM: Peripheral / Périphérique
Opening: Thursday, September 24, 6–8 PM
Artifact Projects
155 Suffolk St., New York, NY 10002
SENSUM: Peripheral / Périphérique
I’m very happy to be part of SENSUM: Peripheral / Périphérique, a curated video installation bringing together the work of an extraordinary group of artists at Artifact Projects in New York.
The exhibition features Samantha Combs, Colette Copeland, Maria Frödl, Delphine Gauly, Natalia Ivanova, Muriel Louveau, Anna Novakov, Eszter Sziksz, Juliette Vivier, Astrid Walenta, and Katrin Woelger.
My contribution is Duality Is Overrated: Act I (2022), a short film created in collaboration with Oakland based artist Oskar Malone Pëyak.
The work emerged from our ongoing Duality Is Overrated project, developed in Oakland as an exploration of the unstable space between oppositions and the possibility of existing beyond fixed binaries.
Through intimacy, architecture, movement, and fragmented cinematic direction, Act I questions the ways we instinctively frame experience through oppositions: self and other, light and shadow, angel and devil, desire and restraint. Repeated cues to “cut, move, reframe” become both a cinematic device and a way of thinking about how we construct, perceive, and reconstruct relationships.
At its center is a question that continues to resonate throughout the project: Can we care for something beyond desire, possession, or the binaries through which we are taught to understand one another?
I’m especially happy to see this work presented alongside such an exciting group of artists and within SENSUM, a project devoted to expanding how we experience moving image, perception, and the sensorial.
