No Feeling Is Final. The Skopje Solidarity Collection

In cooperation with the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) Skopje, North Macedonia

Artists: Brook Andrew • Yane Calovski & Hristina Ivanoska • Siniša Ilić • Iman Issa • Gülsün Karamustafa • Barbi Marković • Elfie Semotan

With artists from the collection: Pierre Alechinsky • Getulio Alviani • Dimitar Avramovski Pandilov • Enrico Baj • Georg Baselitz • Anna-Eva Bergman • Maria Bonomi • Alberto Burri • Zofia Butrymowicz • Alexander Calder • Luis Camnitzer • Christo and Jeanne-Claude • Bronisław Chromy • Peter Clarke • Božidar Damjanovski • Josip Demirović Devj • Josip Diminić • Slobodan Filovski • Michel Gérard • Ion Grigorescu • Sheila Hicks • David Hockney • Alfred Hrdlicka • Bogoljub Ivković • Olga Jančić • Olga Jevrić • Jasper Johns • Alex Katz • Zoltán Kemény • Rudolf Krivoš • Boško Kućanski • Wifredo Lam • Sol LeWitt • Oto Logo • Petar Lubarda • Nikola Martinoski • Roberto Matta • Zoran Mušič • Meret Oppenheim • Olga Peczenko-Srzednicka • Dushan Perchinkov • Pablo Picasso • Bogoja Popovski • Joan Rabascall • Vjenceslav Richter • Bridget Riley • Ivan Sabolić • Niki de Saint Phalle • Francesco Somaini • François Stahly • Henryk Stażewski • Gligor Stefanov • Kumi Sugai • Aneta Svetieva • Beáta Széchy • Dimo Todorovski • Victor Vasarely • Vladimir Veličković • Тоmо Vladimirski • Marjan Vojska

 

Brook Andrew

Artist and curator Brook Andrew (born 1970, lives and works in Melbourne) challenges the limitations imposed by hegemonic power structures to make space for Indigenous systems of being and of knowing. His research as well as artistic practice are informed by his Wiradjuri and Celtic ancestry, motivating him to develop kinship between non-Western and Western cultures that share an intersectional understanding of Indigeneity.

His work has often led him to intervene in museal displays and to reimagine the power of objects found in museum collections. In so doing, he uncovers links to colonialism, cultural expropriation, and violence while centering Indigenous practices as an anticolonial force able to fracture Western ideas such as progress and linearity as well as the art historical canon and the institutions that support it.

In Brook Andrew’s installation, eight works from the collection of MoCA Skopje are placed on a large-scale, strikingly patterned inflatable object and wall mural. The pattern is inspired by Wiradjuri practices of carving, including on living trees and in making shields. Akin to an optical illusion, the pattern is playful yet also points toward underlying truths, such as the many identity shifts undergone not only by the collection’s modernist works – Western and non-Western alike – but also by the city of Skopje itself. The works from the collection are carefully arranged on the mural, with Pablo Picasso’s at the very top. They are dated from 1963 to 1968, a period of both the devastating earthquake and the rebuilding process in Skopje. Together, they delineate a specific moment in time when these works were part of a very specific value system, one that particularly favored Western male artists – the same artists who often appropriated non-Western artworks and designs. This idea is also expressed in the title of the installation, mulunma wiling mangi gudhi. These Wiradjuri words translate to “inside the lip of a stolen song”, hinting at the thin line between appropriation and theft.

Brook Andrew’s work with inflatable structures utilizes the methods of enlargement to recontextualize history and make often overlooked topics appear larger-than-life. The installation spatially reconciles the many contradictory meanings of the loaded modernist discourse that informed the inception of the Solidarity Collection of MoCA Skopje. It celebrates spaces that allowed for such moments of solidarity to materialize while also clearly addressing their many problematic aspects and continuing repercussions.

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No Feeling Is Final. The Skopje Solidarity Collection – Audioguide
Kunsthalle Wien Podcast: Brook Andrew

Interview with Brook Andrew

1. What were your impressions of Skopje and the Solidarity Collection of MoCA Skopje? What did you find interesting about the collection?

Skopje is a place of contrast and beauty. From the visible effects of the earthquake to the call to prayer and hymns I experienced at the Macedonian Orthodox Church – Archdiocese of Ohrid, to the warmth of the people, to the striking design of MoCA, Skopje is inspiring. I really enjoyed walking around and exploring the diversity of cultures and languages. The museum’s collection is overwhelming in many ways – from the history of the collection to the way in which it has inspired presentations of it. It is important that the collection is presented and also on display to show the local cultural ways of doing things and communicating to a broader art and cultural audience, in both Skopje and around the world.

2. How do you relate the works you chose from the collection to your own practice?

The works are not so close to my own practice, though they are chosen as devices to express a timeline of hegemony and constructed worldviews on what, at the time, was popular art and movements and demonstrated a Euro-American art world that is predominantly male. I reflect on the generosity of artists, but also the reality of how this is performed today. It is important to note the struggle between the former Yugoslavian artists and the Euro-American artists, which I have highlighted in my work. The title of my work, mulunma wiling mangi gudhi (inside the lip of a stolen song), attempts to highlight these complex relationships. This title is in Wiradjuri, my mother’s Indigenous language from Wiradjuri country in Australia. My Indigenous heritage has always found commonalities, solidarities, and complex connections with places abroad.

3. What is your view on solidarity in the art world today? Do you think something similar to the MoCA Skopje donations can happen?

Solidarity is, for me, in many ways a fragmented and person-, community-, group-, or kinship-specific alliance. I do not think it is fixed – it shifts and changes, and if it is not malleable, it will break, and then things and people and solidarity all break down. This is why I highlight the complex situation of international artists donating important works but also being part of the problem of the art world. From an Indigenous perspective, we are still trying to insert our own values of solidarity, or at least share them in an international context. This project has been inspiring and required careful thought, as it walks many tightropes of solidarity.

 

Yane Calovski & Hristina Ivanoska

In addition to their individual projects, artists Yane Calovski (born 1973, lives and works in Skopje and Berlin) and Hristina Ivanoska (born 1974, lives and works in Skopje and Berlin) have worked in tandem since 2000. Their collaborative works are characterized by a dynamic use of different media, from performance, installation, text, and theory to drawing, sculpture, and wall engraving. Their work is marked by a desire to illuminate overlooked aspects of history, whether by delving into past events or recreating imagined history in the present moment. The local environment plays a vital role for Yane Calovski and Hristina Ivanoska, who try to recontextualize their workspace and open up opportunities for new interpretations and parallel readings of set beliefs. They often structure their projects as questions instead of answers, allowing viewers to become co-creators of their works’ meanings.

For their spatial installation titled All Things Flowing, the artists propose another look at the history of Skopje’s Museum of Contemporary Art. In 1966, 89 architectural projects were submitted to the open call for building the new museum. Among them, one stood apart – the proposal by Polish architect Oskar Hansen, known for his theory of the “Open Form”.

The architect imagined a transformable exhibition space, able to fold entirely and then unfold in various combinations, with hexagonal elements lifted by hydraulic-powered rotating telescopes. Oskar Hansen imagined the gallery would rise and unfurl toward the sky whenever a new exhibition opened, and otherwise be hidden below ground.

This ambitious proposal formed the initial template for Yane Calovski’s motorized sculptural installation and Hristina Ivanoska’s large-scale mural consisting of specially devised typography. The letters reference “Open Form” and engage in dialogue with works from the MoCA Skopje collection by two Macedonian artists: the painter Dushan Perchinkov and the sculptor Aneta Svetieva.

These two artists might seem like disparate choices. Yet, both of their works pointedly describe the coexisting local practices from the museum’s inception until today: Dushan Perchinkov’s paintings invoke an early modernist tradition of abstract geometric patterns, operating outside the Western canon of modern art, while Aneta Svetieva’s unrefined and expressive terracotta sculptures speak of an almost anthropological understanding of Skopje’s history.

All elements in the installation recreate a landscape that has been destroyed and reborn repeatedly. Combining Oskar Hansen’s vision of the museum with these two Macedonian artists from the collection, Yane Calovski and Hristina Ivanoska purposefully look toward a possible retelling of the local history of art, reimagining the story of the museum, and envisioning a present bursting with potential.

No Feeling Is Final. The Skopje Solidarity Collection – Audioguide
Kunsthalle Wien Podcast: Yane Calovski & Hristina Ivanoska

Interview with Yane Calovski & Hristina Ivanoska

1. What were your impressions of Skopje and the Solidarity Collection of MoCA Skopje? What did you find interesting about the collection?

Hristina Ivanoska: Built on tectonic ground, Skopje is never stable, permanent, and peaceful. The mixture of cultures, histories, and discourses is visible on its surface in constant rivalry with each other and themselves, creating constant tension. As a student at the Faculty of Fine Arts of Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje, the museum’s collection had little effect on my early development as an artist. At that time, MoCA Skopje still had an elitist aura around it, as a space you needed “to deserve” to have access to. Today, I experience the museum as a more democratic space. For the first time, I had the opportunity to devote myself to the collection and have the chance to visit the museum’s collection depot and experience the works with a different kind of immediacy and intimacy.

Yane Calovski: The city of Skopje, for me, represents a work in progress, often abused and misdiagnosed by those in power for political and economic gain, regardless of the needs of the citizens. Nevertheless, Skopje is resilient, continuously unfolding and reconsidering its potential to surprise. For me, the collection of MoCA Skopje has always been an active exploratory organism, unsettlingly growing and evolving since its inception following the devastating earthquake in 1963.

2. How do you relate the works you chose from the collection to your practice?

Yane Calovski: From the vastness of the collection, we selected the works of two active Macedonian artists, Aneta Svetieva and Dushan Perchinkov. Both engage in rediscovering the essential, personified meaning of modernity and tradition. I usually examine the discursive traces in concepts in my sculptural work, playing with rhizomatic overlaps and embracing the residue that embodies elusive ideas about concrete subjects. During the research period at MoCA Skopje, we studied and read the available publications, exhibition catalogues, video interviews, and written interviews and reviews.

Hristina Ivanoska: I have always been amazed by Svetieva’s and Perchinkov’s artworks, but I felt they remain “trapped” in the local context. This project is an opportunity to excavate their work out of the depot, contextualize it, and share it with audiences. Although at first glance very different – Perchinkov is geometric, strict, and analytical in his approach, and Svetieva is impulsive, fast, and unrefined – both share a poetic tenderness toward the landscape in which they grew up, and in which primitive culture and civilization cohabitate in this symbiosis of contradictions. It is precisely that duality of opposites that I recognize in my work as well.

3. What is your view on solidarity in the art world today? Do you think something similar to the MoCA Skopje donations can happen?

Hristina Ivanoska: The 1960s, when the call for creating a collection based on solidarity took place, was a time when the tension between the two blocs declined and when it became possible to imagine a collaboration between the East and the West. However, institutions today are selective and careful and under immense pressure, and I am still determining the collection as a collective achievement that continues to resonate today.

Yane Calovski: The concept of solidarity is political and progressive. However, it has been commodified many times and used as a cover-up to real problems facing the Western-centric art world today. There has always been, and always will be, a significant power imbalance regarding representation, wealth distribution, and the manifestation of knowledge. In such a specific (post-earthquake) period of intensified sociocultural, political, and economic rebuilding of the city, one can argue that the collection was, and still is, a significant “rebuilding” tool. In that regard, its significance is historical and cultural – a case of heritage gaining political power when seen as a sign of its time. Today, while we cannot expect such an outpouring of solidarity in terms of donations of actual artworks, it is still unbelievable that we, as artists, recognize the social importance of contributing, donating, archiving, and sharing our practices through the mechanisms of institutional collections. The Museum of Contemporary Art in Skopje continues to inspire this logic of camaraderie.

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Siniša Ilić

Siniša Ilić (born in 1977, lives and works in Belgrade) is a visual artist who combines works on paper with installation, video, and performance. His work revolves around exploring different social tensions, whether in relation to sustainability, cultural heritage, labor conditions, or migration, as well as finding ways to nurture friendship and solidarity. He frequently approaches these topics from a historical perspective, questioning the relationship between the Global South and West, especially through culminations in violence. Ex-Yugoslavia is often at the forefront of Siniša Ilić’s works, both with regard to its historical significance as well as its connotations today. He is interested in how the past often finds ways to seep through the cracks and whether it can be reconciled with the present moment.

Siniša Ilić proposes a recontextualization of the city of Skopje in a spatial installation titled Filigran. His work connects eight abstract sculptural objects from MoCA Skopje’s collection with his own drawings, collages, and moving images, placing them on platforms of varying heights. In this scenography, the audience is granted an unusually close experience of the artworks, as the viewers are invited to engage with the space and seat themselves close by.

The irregularity of the platforms echoes the layers of Skopje’s landscape and the different vantage points from which we can think about its history and its exceptional meandering between post-earthquake ruin and modernity. This is particularly emphasized in the only figurative sculpture in the selection, Dimo Todorovski’s Mother and Child – Skopje Tragedy (1963), which shows the very literal consequences of the earthquake.

Siniša Ilić’s contemporary works echo Skopje’s wholly different present, showing choreographies of construction and demolition, as well as reuse of materials, but also contemporary conditions of labor. One of the drawings he created from memory shows a fast-food restaurant in Skopje. It invites us to look upon a combination of economic crisis and lethargy, speaking of a different, more symbolic earthquake.

Filigran – whose title refers to a technique of manipulating gold or silver wire into fine ornamental tracery – references the delicate ways in which threads connect history and the present moment, forming a carefully woven pattern of visible past trauma and its resonance today.

No Feeling Is Final. The Skopje Solidarity Collection – Audioguide

Interview with Siniša Ilić

1. What were your impressions of Skopje and the Solidarity Collection of MoCA Skopje? What did you find interesting about the collection?

Layers. The collection feels like a structure that is in constant reshaping as time passes. It feels like it “curates” itself, since it is based on donations and gifts, and so it has an economy and rhythm that stays public – belonging at the same time to the institutions, donors, audiences, and others. This is exciting. It’s similar to my impression of Skopje: that it is a surface with many craters, outcroppings, and threads drawing a delicate landscape.

2. How do you relate the works you chose from the collection to your own practice?

Filigran shows sculptures from the collection, going from abstract to figurative forms and back. Sculptures are complementary with my works on paper and on screens. I wanted to stage tensions between the layers and stories that the collection, the current moment, the artistic forms, and the earthquake bring. I suggest a zigzag path through Filigran and propose a coexistence with art, rather than following only one storyline or statement.

3. What is your view on solidarity in the art world today? Do you think something similar to the MoCA Skopje donations can happen?

I think it can happen and it is happening all the time. The visibility of solidarity and its impact varies depending on the scale of a social crisis. The distribution of wealth and information feels like an obstacle that reminds us that we are not in the same social, class, or personal position in any given moment, and so our reactions resonate differently, which can keep us frustrated, feeling bad or powerless. In that context, if we understand solidarity as a gesture against poverty or scarcity or misfortune, then we as artists and people active in the field of culture can try to share our knowledge, skills, or imagination.

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Iman Issa

Iman Issa’s practice is characterized by a sharp look at the power of display in relation to cultural and academic institutions. While she (born in 1979, lives and works in Vienna and Berlin) often approaches her work experimentally – inviting the viewer to bring their own experience and expectations to the project – her practice is also marked by a precise and clear visual language. Her interest in histories, museums, and collections translates into a method of destabilizing preconceived ideas in respect to knowledge and historical transparency or accuracy by recontextualizing and recombining object-text pairings that suggest other narratives and visions of what we think we know. Whether she is questioning the role of art texts in her Lexicon series (2012–2019) or the relationship between the artist and their work in Proxies, with a Life of Their Own (2019–ongoing), Iman Issa’s work is always a nuanced contemplation of meanings below the surface of the visible.

In a proposition titled I, the Artwork, Iman Issa combines her own works with eight artworks from the collection of MoCA Skopje. The common thread linking these works – a combination of sculptures and prints – is that they all depict figures, many of their faces hidden from view.

Her selection poses the question of whether the artist can take second place to their works and if an artwork can determine its own institutional and artistic context. Carefully selected and arranged, the sculptures, photographs, and video works interweave to create something akin to remakes, where original relations are removed and new ones produced. By severing these ties, the artworks can no longer be read only through the artists’ biographies and instead inspire a variety of other, playful ways of understanding.

Contrary to the usual hierarchies and preconceptions I, the Artwork invites the viewer to engage in a playful thought process with alternate meanings and new connections. For Iman Issa, this process allows “saving the works from appropriation by making the appropriation very transparent”.

No Feeling Is Final. The Skopje Solidarity Collection – Audioguide
Kunsthalle Wien Podcast: Iman Issa

Iman Issa about her work

Thinking about the artworks in the Solidarity Collection at MoCA Skopje that I have seen, and what they might mean today, and how they can and do relate to concerns I have and works I make, has left me with a combination of words that, over the past months, I have been trying to make sense of. I have been doing that through further reading, writing, and making of work, but mainly through the planning of the constellation of elements I will present at the Kunsthalle Wien in the context of this exhibition. These words, triggered by the collection, came to me in the first-person, encompassed by the phrase I, the Artwork.

It is common to think of artworks as victims to their environments, needing to be rescued by the obsessive artist or conscientious curator or dedicated institution who can furnish them with the right context. Yet, rare as it is, one has also encountered and knows of a different kind of artwork: an artwork which is interested neither in being viewed as a victim to its context nor in following the intentions of its maker.

An artwork which hides or reveals itself at will, frequently changing its date and place of conception. An artwork which, when relegated to history, brings that whole history into doubt and, when attributed to the identity, likes, or dislikes of its maker, decides to attribute itself to a different maker, one which may have been invented by itself or who lived in a different time more suited to its current outlook. An artwork which may even take it upon itself to keep its maker’s name but reshape their identity, linking it to other views and attributes more suited to itself – a self situated in a particular time and place but which reserves the right to change along with the change of that time and/or space. An artwork which attributes itself to a lawyer, historian, craftsman, or any such figure, knowing full well that it is and can only ever be made by an artist. An artwork which reshapes the institution into which it is housed: one day exonerating it, standing proudly behind its mission statement, another day embarrassing it out of its wits, loudly disavowing it, making it impossible for it to follow what it had previously been engaged in. An artwork which reserves the right to occasionally participate in ongoing current debates, affirming a curator’s line of thought, at other times remaining mute despite all efforts directed at making it speak. An artwork which, when called an artwork, eschews the name in favor of something else, insisting on being called a document, an artifact, an object, a film, a story, or a news item. An artwork which can exist in any kind of venue, be it an ethnographic, city, folk, modern, or contemporary art museum, or something else entirely. An artwork which can assume any look, sound, feel, material, or immaterial presence and which only upon eclipsing every condition of its display, interpretation, classification, and reception can, proudly and without hesitation, proclaim itself an “artwork.” A proclamation which the artwork’s discerning maker may now sense an urgent need to adopt for themselves as well, and may indeed choose to do so, warily seizing the name I, the Artwork, pausing shortly before adding an artist showing (myself) sometime in the year 2023.

 

Gülsün Karamustafa

Gülsün Karamustafa (born 1946, lives and works in Istanbul and Berlin) is a visual artist and filmmaker known for interweaving personal and historical narratives with contemporary sociopolitical issues. One of the most relevant Turkish contemporary artists, her practice already spans more than five decades. Through painting, sculpture, and film, her work often reflects on the politically turbulent environment of her native Turkey, whether in Prison Paintings (1972–1978), a series of canvases created after her incarceration as a political prisoner, or in The Monument and the Child (2010), a collection of sculptures exploring the complex visual language of modern Turkey and its national monuments. Her works frequently combine elements of historical fact and personal experience, merging childlike impressions with harsh political realities.

Under the title The Crime Scene, Gülsün Karamustafa’s painting Window (1980) and the sculptural installation The Monument and the Child (2010), consisting of ten stands bearing playful ceramic objects, are juxtaposed with a small collection of works from MoCA Skopje. These two sculptures and nine paintings all entered the museum’s collection as a private donation from the family of Radmila Ugrinova-Skalovska. Consisting mostly of Macedonian artists, the collection to some extent reflects the points of view and ambitions of the family who diligently collected the works. It therefore begs the question of how to include such a body of work in the wider context of a museum collection and whether the works from the private collection should be separated out at all.

These questions are also highlighted by Gülsün Karamustafa’s works, which – especially Window – seem to ask at what specific points solidarity is possible and when it is not. The artist answers by placing the works into an imagined family room, complete with pleasant wallpaper and an armchair. The works from the collection of Radmila Ugrinova-Skalovska and Gülsün Karamustafa’s sculptures and painting begin to form a common narrative, but as each work starts to form a part of a whole, it also needs to be recognized individually. Using a method of the sort commonly seen in old crime movies, the artist traces the artworks with tape, reminiscent of white chalk, outlining their complex pasts while establishing their present relationships to one another. With this, the artist opens up the works and their complex relations with one another to investigation.

No Feeling Is Final. The Skopje Solidarity Collection – Audioguide
Kunsthalle Wien Podcast: Gülsün Karamustafa

Interview with Gülsün Karamustafa

1. What were your impressions of Skopje and the Solidarity Collection of MoCA Skopje? What did you find interesting about the collection?

I believe what happened in Skopje after the earthquake in 1963 is unique and very touching. People were more concerned about each other’s problems in those days, and that makes me think that this kind of solidarity will never happen again. Destructive wars are continuing around us. Though we claim that people are in close contact, and we know more than ever about what is happening in the world through technological possibilities, we have never been more ignorant about each other’s grievances.

2. How do you relate the works you chose from the collection to your own practice?

My choices from the MoCA Skopje collection are more about the sculptures and paintings by Macedonian artists as they relate to daily life. Therefore, I wanted to complement them with one painting with a political context and one cheerful sculptural work from my own practice. My wish is to create a peculiar but interesting conversation between those works that may never come together again in the future.

3. What is your view on solidarity in the art world today? Do you think something similar to the MoCA Skopje donations can happen?

Unfortunately, relationships in the art world are more based on profit and self-interest nowadays. Of course, there are attempts by artists and some institutions to break this understanding, by giving more opportunities for collective activities and mutual productions and by creating cross-overs between artists and institutions. But the power of capital always finds ways to break through the solidarity.

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Elfie Semotan

Elfie Semotan (born 1941, lives and works in Vienna and Jennersdorf), whose practice spans six decades and encompasses still lifes, landscapes, fashion editorials, and conceptual works, is perhaps best known for her commercial and fashion photography. Characteristic to her photographic approach, no matter the genre, is an elevation of the mundane aspects of everyday life – be it models with ripped tights, plastic flowers and a garden hose on a Texan tree, or a messy sleeping corner in a celebrated artist’s studio. All motifs show her fascination with and celebration of the unspectacular. Elfie Semotan’s scenes are often nonchalantly framed, foregrounding mood and authenticity, breaking with traditional settings and drawing both from quotidian life and art history.

On the occasion of the exhibition No Feeling is Final, Elfie Semotan captured the unique character of the complex and multilayered city of Skopje in a newly commissioned photographic series. The artist set out to look at the urban landscape, an idiosyncratic pastiche created through the city’s numerous re- and de-constructions, a result of its violent man-made and natural disasters throughout history. But Elfie Semotan also has a keen and kind eye for the details, materials, and textures of everyday life, revealing the poetry, sensuality, and charm that can be found within the messiness and chaos that also inhabit Skopje.

Her images portray Skopje’s cultural diversity – from the Ottoman Old Bazaar, to the modernist rebuilding of the city after the 1963 earthquake, to the crude attempt to remake Skopje as a Classicist city it never was during the course of the Skopje 2014 project. Special focus is given to a series of iconic modernist buildings, such as the National Opera and Ballet, the railway station by Kenzō Tange, the Museum of the Republic of Macedonia by Mimoza Nesterova-Tomić, the iconic Telecommunication Center’s main Counter Hall (which burned down in a suspicious fire in 2013), and, of course, the Museum of Contemporary Art Skopje.

Elfie Semotan’s sensitive documentation is an honest and authentic representation of a city with a particularly difficult and complex political and architectural past, yet also a testament to the beauty and richness that distinguish both the urban and cultural contexts of the city, as well as the extraordinary Solidarity Collection of MoCA Skopje.

No Feeling Is Final. The Skopje Solidarity Collection – Audioguide
Kunsthalle Wien Podcast: Elfie Semotan

Interview with Elfie Semotan

1. What were your impressions of Skopje and the Solidarity Collection of MoCA Skopje? What did you find interesting about the collection?

After I read about the history of Skopje, I looked at the city with a more discerning eye and with a certain mindset and disposition, which is a good thing to do with any city. In the case of Skopje, however, I found such an awareness particularly useful – otherwise it is hard to find an explanation for the different faces of the cityscape. I was very curious to visit the city and wanted to discover the traces of the 1960s and 1970s architecture, the historical structures like the city wall, and the later new buildings, too. But also all the disguises and retouching. That makes Skopje incredibly exciting.

The list of donations to the MoCA is impressive. I know Picasso also sent something. When I went to the museum for the first time, I saw a wonderful Calder mobile with red metal elements hanging around all by itself. Fantastic!

2. How do you relate the works you chose from the collection to your own practice?

Skopje is really an exception. Usually, cities are not so diverse. Extremes are, of course, always fascinating, and Skopje has a lot of them to offer – so much that originated at different times and with different intentions stands one next to the other. We walked around for many hours, but Skopje did not tire me. Sometimes I found it grandiose and sometimes downright funny. It is beautiful, it is picturesque, it is absurd. A wonderful terrain for a photographer.

3. What is your view on solidarity in the art world today? Do you think something similar to the MoCA Skopje donations can happen?

I believe that despite all the lack of solidarity in the art world, despite all the craving for prestige and money, there is a sense of belonging to the art world, a solidarity between those who love art, make art, and simply feel comfortable in this world.

I am a very positive person, and I can imagine that something like this can succeed again. Right now, we are learning the lesson once again that we must show solidarity and pay attention to the rest of the world.