When I Dream I Fly, I Swim

Albena Baeva

02-10-2026 until 31-10-2026

A fully clothed woman swims through the air above the audience. She swims in a straight line over the heads of the audience, over and over again.

Swimming fully clothed suggests the woman in Albena Baeva’s When I Dream I Fly, I Swim did not enter the water voluntarily. Instead, she was caught in it.

Her positioning above the heads of the audience becomes a direct reference to rising sea levels and a world where climate change has fully ruptured. Her swimming warns of a submerged, unlivable reality where humanity is caught in, and forced to navigate, a radically different biosphere.

To see the artwork, the audience has to scan a QR code that is attached to a yellow plastic cat house. This type of plastic house is often used by communities as a makeshift home for stray cats to protect vulnerable animals from bad weather. By linking the clothed swimmer to a shelter for animals, the work suggests that our survival relies on radical cross-species empathy.

When I Dream I Fly, I Swim reminds us of Baeva’s earlier work Flag. The installation Flag consisted of two car tyre swings in front of a wall-size video projection in which a yellow lifebuoy gently swayed on a wall-to-wall ocean. On top of the buoy, a white flag waved in the wind.

Both works use contemplative imagery to create a post-apocalyptic world annihilated by climate change. However, neither work evokes fear. Instead, both works create spaces of contemplation. Space, in which to ask ourselves if this is really the world we aspire to create.

There is no fear in the woman’s swimming in When I Dream I Fly, I Swim. If anything, her calm but regular motion shows determination, an innate resilience or stubbornness to fight one’s fate.
The cat shelter points to the possibility of grassroots urban resistance that creates resilience through empathy.

When I Dream I Fly, I Swim will be included in Forum for Contemporary Art BUNA 04 as part of the partnership between Gallery Gallery and BUNA.
Gallery Gallery BUNA can be visited at Preslav 23, Varna.