Group Exhibition ANONYMOUS IS THE ANSWER

Group Exhibition

ANONYMOUS IS THE ANSWER

Curator: IVANA VASEVA

Date and venue: 26 June – 20 September 2019

NATIONAL GALLERY OF THE REPUBLIC OF NORTH MACEDONIA – DAUT PASHA HAMMAM

Opening: 26 June 2019 (Wednesday), 20:00 hrs

With:

THE MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART IN BERLIN IN COLLABORATION WITH WALTER BENJAMIN

ELLIE GA (New York/Stockholm)

ADRIAN PACI (Shkodër/Milan)

DOPLGENGER (Belgrade)

OLIVER MUSOVIK (Skopje)

FILIP JOVANOVSKI (Bitola/Skopje)

Designer:

Boris Shemov

AND:

Permanent national exhibition XIV–XX Century, designed and placed in 2000

Documentation from a student’s protest in 1959 in Skopje

Programme:

Performance by Ellie Ga, 26 June, 20:30 hrs

Lecture by Adrian Paci, 9 September, 19:30 hrs

We live in a time when the choice and way of showing the past is crucial for the democratization of modern society. History is a collective memory that gives meaning to our political existence and action. Whether our livelihoods and professional endeavors will be lead towards emphasizing that which is public, common and developmental, or towards more individualization and growth, typical of today’s global capitalism, is also dependent on how we value the past and from which point do we start to create our history.

From a post-colonial point of view, the institutionalized modernism, as the existent dominant paradigm, the authority and the assumption of knowledge is a result of the colonial rule or in this case, the voluntarily accepted self-colonized rule that, between desires and reality, but also the authoritarian spirits, led to its long-term maintenance and self-reinforcement. It manifests itself in the ways in which the art is produced, distributed, perceived and presented and is perpetually contributing to the economic growth typical of the western modern project.

“Anonymous is the answer” starts from this point of view.

“Anonymous is the answer” is an exhibition of the constant resistance to the world we live in and is built up of resistant political subjectivities. It talks about the importance of interrupting/confronting existing forms of knowledge and acting as crucial elements in the processes of decolonization of knowledge within the art institution. The exhibition tests the boundaries of endurance, not in the physical sense, but in opposing to the limits of the canon and the surroundings of the past, as well as in aesthetic representation, where artistic gestures sometimes occur as chance occurrences or reactions. Ultimately the exhibition tells of the loss of the recognizable in the identity by introducing the ideas of collectivity and solidarity.

The works are placed between a network of memory materials that should offer additional meaning in a multifaceted, multi-time and diachronic image, happening in this moment, here and now.

The exhibition “Anonymous is the answer” is supported by The Ministry of Culture of Republic of North Macedonia and the organization Faculty of things that can’t be learned (FR~U).