Image above: Yane Calovski and Hristina Ivanoska: A Form Of An Answer, digital photography, edition, courtesy the artists, 2017.
Curator: Branka Benčić
Organized by Tihomir Milovac (Museum of Contemporary Art) and Vanja Žanko (Nomad).
Produced by the Museum of Contemporary Art and Nomad.
Supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia, the City of Zagreb, and the City of Skopje.
Partners: Apoteka – Space for Contemporary Art and Press to Exit Project Space.
The exhibition Dialogue (A Form of an Answer) is the second chapter in a three-part exhibition series conceived to gather and map the individual and collective interests of the artists, focusing on the politics of art production and the institutional contexts in which they operate.
The first phase of the exhibition process was the installation Prologue (A Form of a Question), realized in September and October at Apoteka – Space for Contemporary Art in Vodnjan. The third and final chapter, titled Epilogue (A Form of an Argument), was staged at Press to Exit Project Space and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Skopje in 2018.
Dialogue (A Form of an Answer) brings together selected works from Calovski’s and Ivanoska’s recent artistic production, including We Are All in This Alone (56th Venice Biennale – Pavilion of the Republic of Macedonia, 2015), Unspoken (Malmö Konstmuseum, 2015), To Fold Within As To Hide (Bauhaus Foundation Dessau, 2015), and A Form of an Answer (Sculpture Space, New York, 2016).
The exhibition display at the Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb revisits and rearranges the artists’ practice in situ, creating a contextual framework within the galleries of the museum’s permanent collection. Conceived as a fragmented retrospective, the exhibition unfolds through fissures and highlights, establishing new visible and invisible connections between the works.
Central Gallery
We Are All in This Alone (2015) is a collaborative installation incorporating architecture, wall painting, wooden sculptures, and drawings. The work developed in phases and focuses on the recontextualization of a pre-Renaissance fresco by an anonymous artist from the 12th-century Church of St. Gjorgi in Kurbinovo (Macedonia). The drawings integrated into the installation are based on reconstructed writings by feminist philosophers Simone Weil (1909–1943) and Luce Irigaray (b. 1930), as well as previously unknown notes by the artist Paul Thek from the 1970s. The work articulates the ways in which we continuously engage with and disengage the past from the present, while questioning notions of faith, labor, and the production of value under contemporary socio-political conditions.
Untitled (Society of Marginal Persons) (2012) by Hristina Ivanoska is a two-sided linen banner incorporating text and imagery related to awareness, dignity, and the spiritual value of an imagined social group. The exhibited side symbolizes unattainable political ideals meant to improve society, represented through the four alchemical elements—or colors—black, white, gold, and red, aligning aspirations for “Justice, Equality, and Liberty,” a slogan associated with 19th-century writer and political activist Josephine Butler. The hidden reverse side represents lived reality, using the colors of nature—blue, green, white, and red-orange—to evoke human suffering in the search for love and happiness.
Drawings from the series A Form of an Answer, developed in 2016 at Sculpture Space, New York.
Left Gallery
Oneness (2016) is a collaborative installation of nine paintings made with graphite, embroidery, and textile paint on hand-woven linen fabric dating from the early 1900s, originating in Eastern Europe and traditionally used for burial rituals. The work incorporates a conceptual text by Ad Reinhardt and graphic design by Bridget Riley, originally published in 1966 in Poor.Old.Tired.Horse No. 18, a magazine for concrete poetry edited by Ian Hamilton Finlay. Reinhardt’s text, with its urgent tone, resonates strongly with issues central to Calovski’s and Ivanoska’s practice, such as institutional critique, contextualization of art production, and personal politics. The artists’ long-standing interest in linen as a material connecting narrative forms from past to present led them to collaborate with the Monastery of the Holy Mother of God (Matka, Macedonia) to better understand its material and symbolic history. The panels function as traditional surfaces on which social rituals are reimagined. Through hand-woven linen and embroidery techniques—historically practiced by women in isolation—the work emphasizes dualities such as private and public, spoken and unspoken, written and vocal, generating various forms of resistance across cultures.
Document Missing: Performance No. 5 (Action Object) (2017) is part of Ivanoska’s ongoing research project Document Missing: The Intricate Sense of Truth in Oral Histories, developed as part of her PhD-in-Practice at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. The project comprises a series of performances addressing suppression, control, and the construction of collective memory, particularly in relation to women’s resistance strategies and political agency. As the sole protagonist, Ivanoska becomes a flexible and porous medium through which different identities are reactivated via texts and actions that both “were and were not.” One key subject of this research is Rosa Plaveva, a Macedonian revolutionary from the turn of the 20th century whose role has largely been forgotten in historical narratives.
Unspoken (2015) is a collaborative installation of three canvases representing a symbiosis of spiritual, textual, and painterly expression. The works draw inspiration from three geometric forms—the cross, the triangle, and the sphere—used by Swedish artist Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) as abstract symbols of spiritual potency. These forms are placed in dialogue with fragments from the text Untitled (The Sovereign Republic of the Spirit) (2015) by curator and writer Sebastian Cichocki: “Let the good not fill the form but transcend it,” “Let the artist not be a false god,” and “Let the body of work be our body.” Hilma af Klint believed that “when this (male–female) balance is attained one can leave the physical plane and join the angels” (Fant, 1985).
Fairy Hair (2016/17) is a series of three wooden carvings by Ivanoska that address female emancipation and the relationship between the political, social, and spiritual self within the community as a spatial and conceptual construct. Writing here becomes carving—a traditionally masculine and predominantly visual activity. The objects function as minimal interpretations of domestic and art-historical narratives informed by feminist theory and the politics of representation.
Right Gallery
Yane Calovski’s series of wall objects Compressed Minimum (2016/17) is a multifaceted body of work synthesizing artistic, scientific, and technological processes. Synthetic rubber is produced through a combination of industrial and natural methods, incorporating chemical elements, pigments, and other materials cast in icon-shaped moulds. These objects function as contemporary icons, embedded with functional, aesthetic, and chromatic references drawn from the urban environment of Skopje, and relate to Calovski’s research into future archiving processes. The works were produced in collaboration with the specialized rubber production laboratory Hrisal in Skopje.
The series (Objects) To Fold Within As To Hide (2015/17) consists of floor and wall elements originally designed in response to archival and preservation strategies employed by the Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau in relation to the history of materials, production, and modernist design narratives. The works were developed for the Oskar Schlemmer Master House and commissioned for the exhibition Haushaltsmesse 2015, curated by Elke Krasny and Regina Bittner.
Both projects employ synthetic rubber (polymer/artificial elastomer) combined with zinc oxide, chalk, silicon, titanium dioxide, polyethene glycol (PEG), stearin, silicone compounds, and organic pigments.
The works To Work in Order to Eat in Order to Work and Archived Outline possess a basic, almost anti-visual quality. They form assemblies of horizontal, vertical, and circular shapes that speculate on the spiritual nature of geometry, ultimately illustrating the oblique relationship between labor and capital accumulation, the worker and the construction of value. These works are part of A Form of an Answer, a collaborative research project addressing manual labor in relation to contemporary knowledge production and representation. Referenced sources include tailoring studies by Antoinette van Eyck (1935) and Simone Weil’s text The Mysticism of Work.