CURATING EXCHANGE 4: Perpetual and Spatial Control

Symposium | Curating Exchange 4 | presentation "Perpetual and Spatial Control" by the curator Basak Senova | organized by press to exit project space | Serious Interest Agency, Skopje | 27 March 2015, 19.30 h.
 
"Regardless of constructed histories and collective memories, the act of remembering is always attached to a 'defined place'. It is inevitable for any affirmative perception of space to be historicized and politicized. Hence, most of these specific places are loaded with memory and control mechanisms. The perpetual and spatial considerations of most of Senova’s curatorial work are shaped through these conditions. The question then arises: What is the responsibility of a curator in relation to such specific places along with their loaded memory, conflicting sensibilities, and controlling entities? How does the curatorial framework correlate with spatial, physiological, ideological, historical, communicational, and informational challenges?

Where (not) to go?

Exhibition | Where (not) to go? | organized by press to exit project space | curated by Jovanka Popova| Gallery MC, New York|16 February - 1 March 2015 (opening reception followed by informal talk with the curator and artists Gjorgje Jovanovik and Yane Calovski: Monday, 23 February, 7 pm).

Artists: Hristina Ivanoska, Nada Prlja, Neda Firfova, Filip Jovanovski, Daniel Serafimovski, Gjorgje Jovanovik, Tihomir Topuzovski, Aleksandar Kovachevski, Nikola Uzunovski, Vladimir Lukash and Yane Calovski.

What is the input of social and political clashes in the process of recreating of public space? Can we interpret the term ‘urbanity’ as nucleus of social solidarity or as a space of materializing various political agendas? How do we manage power and its direct affect on urban development? By deconstructing the processes of illustrating, archiving, documenting and performing, the artists in the exhibition face up to the multitude of contradictions in which we, as a society, exist in Macedonia.

Addressing subjects such as the historical and urban development of the city of Skopje, the wide-spread social inequality, political, cultural and economic oppression of marginalized groups, educational reform and redesign of traditional values, the works do not shy away from arguing the necessity to probe further into the problems and articulate their individual positions. So, where not to go, as a version of “Don’t go there”, becomes “Why wait any longer?”. The attention is turned toward the left-oriented voices, the gray-zone classification of activism, and the borderline points where discourses are contested in order to generate counter-discourses.