School of Fine Art Sculpture & Environmental Art
Mila Manasova
Hi there, welcome to my page. My pagey page. I imagine you have come on here looking for a little something and that is the nugget I have for you. The little morsel to satisfy what I imagine is some curiosity.
My work, if you have seen it yet, is a teenage bedroom. It is, in fact, the teenage bedroom of my fantasies. I enjoyed creation and imagining it, though I have to admit it was as though I was unearthing a buried image that was already there, scratching off caked-on mud, and not at all creating anything that doesn’t already exist in my mind- and by the looks of things, in a lot of the minds of my generation. What does that say about those powerful adverts….anyway, more on that later.
Within the bedroom is a big film in a large puppet show theatre. It recreates the scenes of a big old performance evening I organised in March 2025. There are pillow fights, plain old fights and fashion shows. Each scene is soundtracked by pop songs the we made up about sleepovers and wanting to be a pop star. They are very good songs for dancing to.
On the large TV monitor, which we call the big chunky TVs and is technically named a CRT, there is a video of me dancing in my kitchen interspersed with many different scenes from my inner world. A zoom in of a Macedonia poster from the offices of my grandfather, strewn purple shawls, a fully lit performance of me with my electric guitar in my bedroom. It is a bit of a collage of behind the scenes, both technically and emotionally. The emotional behind the scenes of striving to achieve something with variable success and a whole lot of DIY.
In the space, in the space, in the space! There are, vases. And tiles and things. My mother clasped them on the opening- she wanted to take them away. They are yellow and Green. They have texts to my mum from when she was getting used to letting my brother and I explore the western world. They have allusions to my attempts to learn Cyrillic alphabet as a child.
On the wall, hanging off of what I hope reminds you of the poster racks at HMV, are 3 massive magazine page screen prints. On them are large photographs of me and my bands looking great, there is a quiz to discover what kind of a bedroom you are. There are all sorts. It is a good time.
It all alludes to this great momentum of asking everyone to at least remember a time at which they wanted to be a pop star, or wanted to be something, and remind them of the aspiration, excitement and delusion that encases that.
In my life, I imagined it all in a bedroom- so I present it to you as the Source, the Centre of my creations.
thank you for listening and coming to see it.
love, mila
meandt
Sleepover show
The sleepover show was a 3 hour 30 performance night hosted outside the Stow. It was a combination of performances that I had collaboratively created with participants around the theme of a sleepover and some submitted performances from the artistic community at Stow. It began with a 15 minute parade/call to attention around each floor of the building with a big old drum and a bunch of people. We chanted ‘Sleepover show, outside stow’. It was great.
The running order included excellent music from Lottie Morton, Roof Cats and Anna Tewungwa. Photographed by Sophie Darling.
I restaged each of the sleepover scenes in a studio and made up pop songs about sleepovers with Rufus and Matty. I combined it into a music video cum album launch video from which the stills below are.
Bedroom as a site of resistance
You could say this is my anthropological study of western teen girlhood when I was 7. My model replica of what I imagined an English girl my age would be living in at home. What I imagined my peers may be living in at home.
So I suppose in that way it is fulfilling a vouyeristic urge to understand what the hell was going on in this place. Behind the doors through which I couldn’t see. The lives I could only imagine…
The result is a slightly filled-in collection of objects. Things I saw on TV and liked. Things that I impressed me. Things that girls around me actually had. All sorts of things.
It’s about my experience as an immigrant style individual and the moment I began to try to integrate into Western Culture (a long and laborious process). That moment was those early tween experiences- 2007.
In my essay, called Fantasising becoming a Westerner, I write “ the work that I am presenting is only decolonial in dialogue with
my own experiences and in specific context, the whole exhibition relies on dialogue and subtle
combinations of concepts”. I think this rings true for how this installation must be read to make any sense. I am sort of important to it.
Looking back at all of this, all of it, I can see why it was challenging. But then it felt like a big fat nobody could give a toss about how completely confusing and impossible I was finding it.
Like, nobody teaches you how to talk to parents. I didn’t know how to use English expressions of politeness, I didn’t know what Tea was, or what it practically entailed and neither did my mother. I didn’t know what sleepover etiquette was and I was deeply embarrassed about it. All understandably… it was upsetting.
And yet my mother had quite a bravdic, I-don’t-need-to-know-what-tea-is, they-can-take-their-tea-and-shove-it-up-their-arse kind of attitude. Which also confused me. Why should they take their tea and shove it up their arse? I’d quite like to experience, what I have heard, is fish fingers and peas. I’d like that. And if it’s not that, perhaps I’d like that too. I won’t know if you keep saying that I don’t need their teas. Anyway.
I wanted to be in, and then I got in. And th en, confusingly (heroically), I refused to give up my own approaches and become culturally English. So I was proudly different but surrounded myself with the in-crowd. Of white English people. Why? Good question. Here is the answer.
Well the truth is, I haven’t figured it out. I, sadly, appear to have figured very little of it out.
I think there is some old 2007 juju energy from my struggles wanting to be heard in my artwork. And I think I hear a hark to be a pop star for unknown (potentially attention-based) reasons.