Have you ever wanted to change places with another person? This is what a group of female artists did as part of the Changing Places project. As a result of the experiment, the artists created a variety of artistic works which were arranged at the ATA Centre for Contemporary Art last Friday.

Eleven women from Switzerland, Austria, Macedonia, Romania and Bulgaria participated in the project, which was initiated in 2000 by a group of Bulgarian artists united under the name March 8th. The project was inspired by the desire of the artists to look through the eyes of other artists and to examine the influence that political, economic and social conditions have on the artistic process.

For a period of about 10 days, each of the participants changed places with another participant, occupying the other's studio, home, country, and world. This changing of places produced a variety of works of art - installations, objects, artistic books, videos, net-art, performances - all of which are currently on display at the ATA centre. Some of the questions posed by the project as a whole were: Do all female artists speak the same artistic language? And, in what way do contemporary aesthetics fall under the influence of ideology, religion and politics?

"We tried to visualize all the different perspectives of feminism and present them to the public," said the curator of the exhibition, Maria Vassileva. "However, we wanted not only to show different female points of view, but also the difference between the Eastern and Western points of view."

Vassileva said that in selecting participants, she tried to gather professional artists who were open to new experiences, new ideas and were interested in artistic cooperation.

The first part of the project was the actual changing of places, when the artists switched studios. "That was a very dynamic period filled with new acquaintances and experiences," Vassileva noted. "The idea of these changes was not only for the artists to get to know each other but also to get to know the place where the other comes from, the problems of that place."

According to the curator, some of the works were very influenced by the political environment. "For example, the works of the Macedonian artist Ana Stojkovic and those of Bulgarian Alla Georgieva, who went to Macedonia, were clearly influenced by the political conditions in that country," Vassileva explained, adding that, apparently, the political situation in Macedonia was so disturbing that neither of the artists could break away from the tension there and create more poetic works.

Indeed, the works by the two artists are filled with military elements. Georgieva's installation "Macedonian Blanket" consists of a blanket made of camouflage-coloured cloth and stretched on the floor. On the blanket the artist has patched prints of photos showing views from Macedonia. The dynamic part of the installation is four toy soldiers with guns who move and shoot when switched on.

The most impressive work in the exhibition, however, is Nadezhda Oleg Lyahova's "A Landscape from Switzerland made of Turkish Delight" (Turkish delight is a traditional jelly-type sweet). The artist has used as a pattern a postcard with a Swiss clock tower and buildings. Lyahova, however, has interpreted the Swiss theme in an Eastern oriental manner. She has taken 6,000 small cubes of Turkish delight in different colours, and pinched them with short sticks on a styrofoam board, that way creating a splendid mosaic.

"In order to participate in the Changing Places project I must first know my own place," Lyahova wrote in a short massage put next to her work. "I was born and live in the Balkans, Europe is to the West, the Near East is to the east. For the developed Western countries, time is money. For the Balkans time is not money.

"On the one hand, a Swiss-made wristwatch is ticking away regularly. On the other hand, a Turkish delight is dragging on heavily. Located in between these two, the thing which is logically left for me to do is combine the sweet, dragging stickiness with the cold mechanical ticking, to stretch the Turkish delight in the rhythm of the Swiss wristwatch."

The Changing Places exhibition is on display at ATA (2 Ploshtad na Svobodata) until December 9.