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Installations, Murals, Drawings, Textile
24.12.2024-21.01.2025
History Museum, Museum of the Republic of North Macedonia, Skopje, in the frame of Festival for Feminist Culture and Action “Firstborn Girl #11” and celebrating 80 years of Women’s Antifascist Front in Macedonia. Enabler: Jana Kocevska. Interlocutor and author of the text in the catalogue Slavcho Dimitrov. Photo: Robert Jankuloski.
"The latest artistic-research project by Hristina Ivanoska, materialised in this exhibition titled “Giants and Snowflakes”, refers to the poem of the same name from the poetry book “Aegean Gunpowder Fairytale” by writer Slavko Janevski, published in 1950, with an excerpt featured in issue 64 of “Makedonka” magazine from the same year. The project consists of three interwoven and interconnected layers or segments, which we can read as reflections on the present, the past, and the future. On the first level of the exhibition space at the Museum of Macedonia, (...) Ivanoska constructs a triptych composed of inscription, painting, repetition, material deconstruction, recontextualization, abstraction, and recomposition of a text rendered in a typeface she designed herself, called “Archetype Open Form.” (...)
The artist first creates a mural with text written in her own typeface, whose ambiguity and insistence on “staying with the discomfort” is intensified through the disruption of the linearity of the script and the overlapping of letters painted in nine colours, selected from the covers of the magazine “Makedonka.” On a second wall, Ivanoska paints a new mural — this time isolating, zooming in, and copying a detail, a singular element from the first mural. In the third part of this triptych, on the marble floor of the museum space, she paints the same text again — this time on plywood — now focusing on the materiality of the sign itself, disrupting the order of the letters and delivering a new sensory shock through a play of texture, form, and the visual dimension of both the typeface and the meaning of the text. (…)
In this way, the artist leads us into the second layer of the exhibition, composed of reproductions of the covers of “Makedonka,” onto which she makes interventions such as cut-outs — incisions that act simultaneously as ruptures in both the patriarchal and fascist universes, as well as in the limitations of political subjectivation and transformation brought forth by the AFŽ (Antifascist Women’s Front). By bringing the emancipatory power of the AFŽ to the foreground, Ivanoska simultaneously points to the unfulfilled promises that remain as a legacy for current generations to envision and create a different future. (…)
In the third part of the exhibition, Ivanoska continues the dynamic movement of returning to the past and leaping forward into the future, through the free play of imagination as a condition for the liberation of materiality, sensuality, and corporeality. (…) The exhibited dress — meticulously, carefully, and devotedly hand-embroidered by the artist herself, as a performative repetition of the history of women’s labour and the temporal investment it entails, with both practical and creative implications — stands as testimony to the subversive potential of these working practices. (…) If our human bodies, environments, actions, and communities, as Ivanoska suggests, are constitutively entangled, co-evolved, ecologically interdependent, and intertwined with non-human materialities and forms of life, this inevitably imposes the imperative to abandon fantasies of self-forming and self-sustaining systems and bodies. It opens up the question of the survival of communities and life as a sympoietic practice of co-existence and responsibility, and as “multi-species communities.” (…)
Ivanoska offers us a signpost, placing in the space letters cut from metal and painted in white recycled paint, as yet another play of layers, overlaps, voids, and imagination, from which two figures emerge. Not the obedient wife, mother, or daughter, but the free, dancing, pleasure-filled VILA (a Slavic fairy or nymph-like figure). Not a goddess, nor new gods of salvation, nor phantasmic and lost unities and pure bodies, but the CYBORG. (…) These figures, “oppositional, utopian, and entirely without innocence,” form the horizon that Ivanoska offers, and in the empty spaces and unclear boundaries, our responsibility remains — to find our place within them."
Slavcho Dimitrov, excerpt from the catalogue.