One shows how the newly commissioned interventions interact with the Collection of Solidarity the other coincides with a historical reconstruction of events that happened from the 1963 earthquake to “Skopje 2014” – a controversial urbanistic project initiated in 2010 that was financed by the then-ruling nationalist party. The Skopje Solidarity Collection, Kunsthalle Wien 2023, photo: This is particularly evident in the manner through which the artistic team have organized the exhibition space, according to two trajectories. As in the lines of the poem from which WHW have borrowed the exhibition’s title, poet Rainer Maria Rilke encourages readers to examine the facts of life for what they are – in their beauty and obscurity, seemingly, No Feeling is Final provides visitors with the tools to analyze the present critically, without losing an eye toward the future. While the tragic nature of these kinds of events is a presence in the room, it is not the dominant viewpoint from which the events of 1963 have been told – but rather the contrary. Even if No Feeling is Final had been conceived two years ago, when neither the recent earthquake in Turkey nor the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine were urgent realities as they are today, a parallel between today and the events of the 1960s’ rises spontaneously in anyone’s eyes. The Contemporary Art Museum (MoCA) Skopje was created through this initial gesture of generosity. It was not a bourgeois taste that generated this collection but rather the genuine donations of more than a hundred artists who sent artworks of different media and styles to the North Macedonian capital. Informed by these ambitions, No Feeling is Final has reanimated the historical memory that happened within the broader historical context of the Cold War, such as the amassing of a collection of more than 100 works that followed the destruction of the urban area of Skopje, due to an earthquake in 1963. Since then, the curatorial trio has proposed a unique program encompassing monographic exhibitions and group shows leading to international collaborations, that demonstrate their commitment to fueling productive exchange, often between the Western Balkans – where they come from – and Central Europe – where they have relocated themselves, through locally informed and context-aware sensibilities, and by using the exhibition as a tool for political debate – to paraphrase their voices. In the spring of 2024, No Feeling is Final will travel to the National Gallery of Prague and then return to its original caretaker, MoCA, Skopje, at the end of next year.Įlfie Semotan, Untitled (Still Life), Skopje, 2022, courtesy Studio Semotan © Elfie Semotan.Īfter twenty years of working from Zagreb, Croatia, with many high-profile international projects, Ivet Ćurlin, Nataša Ilić, and Sabina Sabolovićhave took leadership of Kunsthalle Wien, following the resignation of former director Nicolaus Schafhausen in 2019. Finally, they asked photographer, Elfie Semotan, and the Serbian, Vienna-based fiction writer, Barbi Marković, to create a visual and written commentary on the preparatory path that led to the collection’s arrival in the Austrian capital. In close collaboration with Contemporary Art Museum (MoCA) Skopje, the WHW invited six artists to engage with the artworks of this one-of-a-kind collection: Belgrade-based artist Siniša Ilić, the Macedonian duo Yane Calovski and Hristina Ivanoska, Turkish filmmaker and visual artist Gülsün Karamustafa, Australian artist Brook Andrew, and Egyptian artist Iman Issa. The Skopje Solidarity Collection, an exhibition that opened at Kunsthalle Wien, on the 20th of April and will last until the 28th of January, 2024, the artistic team, formed by the curatorial collective WHW (What, How & for Whom), challenges visitors’ on what “solidarity” might mean in today’s socio-political climate by anchoring their proposal on a concrete case study: the Collection of Solidarity of the Contemporary Art Museum (MoCA) Skopje. What makes a collection exhibition worth attending is the curatorial ability to show, against any forms of assumption, how a specific collection can reorient us in the way we look at the issues of the present, and to demonstrate that the conditions in which the collection has been assembled still hold a specific historical weight that has not been investigated enough yet.
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