About the artist

Petko Dourmana is a contemporary artist whose work investigates how technology shapes perception, political imagination, and the experience of reality. Using infrared optics, custom-built imaging systems, networked platforms, and hybrid installation formats, he creates environments where visibility is unstable and truth appears in multiple layers.

Since the mid-1990s, Dourmana has been one of the earliest Eastern European artists exploring digital culture as a living environment. His groundbreaking internet-based works marked a shift away from the static screen and toward shared virtual presence. Over the following decade he developed immersive installations using night-vision equipment, thermal cameras, and real-time surveillance tools — technologies originally designed for military or forensic use, reintroduced in an artistic context.

A pivotal work in his career, Post Global Warming Survival Kit (2008), presented at the Sundance Film Festival – New Frontiers 2010, placed the audience inside a darkened field of vision navigable only through night-vision cameras. The viewer sees the world the way machines and soldiers do — through amplified shadows and invisible radiation — revealing how technology reshapes not just what we perceive, but how we feel and behave. The piece became one of the most widely discussed media-art installations from Eastern Europe in that period.

Another key project, The Three Migrants, used infrared photography to create a haunting, spectral narrative about displacement and the fragility of human presence. Appearing half-visible and half-erased, the figures embody the tension between bodies and borders, memory and surveillance — themes that remain central to Dourmana’s practice. The work was shown widely in Europe and contributed to his long-standing engagement with migration, visibility, and political vulnerability.

Dourmana’s installations and technological experiments have been presented internationally at SIGGRAPH, Transmediale (where he was nominated for the festival award), ZKM Karlsruhe, the House of World Cultures in Berlin, KUMU Art Museum (Tallinn), Röda Sten Konsthall (Gothenburg), MODEM (Debrecen), among many others.

His latest project, Double Portraits (2019–2025), continues this investigation of layered perception. Each painting contains two images: a visible pop-iconographic surface drawn from media culture, and a hidden infrared portrait that appears only through IR-sensitive devices. The works examine political identity, propaganda, and the mechanisms through which visibility and power are constructed in a technologically mediated world. By pairing the seductive surface of popular imagery with an invisible layer accessible only to machines, Dourmana reveals how contemporary society is governed by two simultaneous realities: the world we see, and the world observed, recorded, and interpreted by technology.

Across all his projects, Dourmana challenges viewers to confront the uncertain border between spectacle and truth, presence and disappearance, human perception and the opaque logic of technological systems.