Syndicate: (Fwd) SCCA - Skopje & Prague SCARP Project

["Melentie Pandilovski" <mpandil@soros.org.mk>]

Hi,

Some interesting events in Skopje by domestic artists by the end of this 
Gregorian calendar year. 

1.

Tonight, 19.12. in Mala Stanica (Small Station) at 19.00:
in organization of SCCA-Skopje.

OUT OF PHOTO 2/
Artists: Nada Prlja and Robert Jankulovski
Curator: Nebojsa Vilic


Please find enclosed the announcement for the second part of the 
project OUT OF PHOTO as a SCARP project between SCCA - Skopje and 
SCCA - Prague. For Your information last year [Out of Photo 1] was 
organized together with Ludwig Hlavacek and SCCA - Prague staff 
showing Veronika Bromova and Milena Dopitova in Skopje's Cultural 
Center 'Mala Stanica' opened at October 10, 1996.

So, here is the preliminary text for this one's issue which opening is 
tonight at 19.:

Out of Photo is a cycle of exhibitions presenting several recent
explorations, which treat the use of photography not as an independent
(or autonomous) medium, but in the ranges of surpassing such autonomy.
Out of Photo follows the most current concept Out of the Media in
which prevailing is the stepping out of the supporting medium:
executing it as only one part of the forming process. The different
approaches and treatments of this stepping forward vary in very
different phenomena.

Two of them are as well presented on the exhibition Out of Photo 2.

Robert Jankuloski in this occasion grasps a certain 'mediated'
commitment in his work. This mediation comes from the selection of
Diane Arbus, photographer who locates the theme of his art works in
the marginalized groups of people. Whilst, in a staging of the
photographic studio Jankuloski (in the form of homage) indirectly
intends to concern this committed approach. Nada Prlja supports the
line of a technologic 'step forwards' taking ahead of all into
consideration the transformation of media which result in a completely
different finality. The first comment that it is a matter of a
video-project is corrected by the finding out that in fact the video
animation has been achieved by the lining up of previously produced
and scanned photographs. The transformation of the medium is the
aspect that makes this work of art paradigmatic for this cycle of
exhibitions.

Out of Photo 2 (as last year's exhibition Out of Photo 1) sets the two
extremes of the stepping out: from the retaining of the originality of
the photographic medium to its complete surpassing-with-canceling.


2. 
THE THIRD ANNUAL EXHIBITION OF THE SOROS CENTER 
FOR CONTEMPORARY ARTS - SKOPJE, MACEDONIA

24.12.97. in the Hall of OSI - Macedonia.

on the theme:

S C A N D A L

Curator of the exhibition:
Nebojsa Vilic, Ph.D.

Presentation of  35 works by 17 artists. 

 -Scandal m (a case which gains wide commenting and causes complains,
 noises,    shouting, disorder); scandalizes pf and impf I (causes
 detest by the breaking of the rules of decency); II (to disgust, to
 detest, to become disgusted with, to loathe); scandalous adj. person;
 scandal (Greek. skandalon) to shock, to scandalize, to create
 forceful complains, anger, to make upset; to scandalize (nlat.
 scandalisare) make (or: cause, provoke) scandal; scandalous (nlat.
 Fr. scandaleux) shocking, shameful, disgusting, horrible.
- scandal n a disgraceful event or action; talk arising from immoral
behaviour; a feeling of moral outrage; the thing or person causing
this; disgrase; malicious gossip; scandalize vt to shock the moral
feelings of; to defame; scandalmonger n a person who spreads scandal
or malicious gossip; scandalous adj causing scandal; shameful;
spreading slander. - engagement (Fr. Engagement) obliged, obligation,
to pledge, to pawn; entering a service, agreement, hiring, regular
duty; mil/ squabble, clash, conflict, battle; engage (fr. Engager) to
take an obligation, to take into service, to favor, to hire, to
induce, to talk into, to go into something, to engage in something, to
release, to entangle in battle; to engage to support something, to
pledge for something, to pledge (for someone or something): engaged
obligated, who has promised, who is taken into service; mil. engaged
in battle. - com-mit vti (com-mit-ting, com-mit-ted) to entrust; to
consign (to prison); to do, to perpetrate a crime, etc; to pledge, to
involve. - committer n.; 1. To do; perpetrate. 2. To place in trust or
custody; entrust; especially, to consign to an institution or prison.
3. To consign to any person, place, or use. 4. To devote; pledge;
hence, to involve, compromise, or bind (oneself). 5. To consign for
future reference, preservation, or disposal: to commit a speech to
memory or to writing; Commit these bones to the earth. 6. To refer, as
to a committee for consideration or report: a preliamentary term. [<L
committere join, entrust <com- together + mittere send] -
com-mit'ta-ble adj. - com-mit-ment n 1. The act or process of
entrusting or consigning for safekeeping. 2. An act of engagement or
pledging. 3. The act of doing; perpetration. 4. An engagement that
restricts freedom; an obligation; an order for imprisonment or
confinement in a mental institution (-also com-mit'tal); committed adj
dedicated; pledged by a commitment.

The project with the theme 'SCANDAL' is determined by the Board of he
Center, proposed by the Curator. The motives for this choice are urged
by the need the theme and medium to reflect an actual concept, which
is also relevant in an international context. The achieving of the
conception of this project anticipates new practical and theoretical
explorations and will be realized on four levels. 

- CURATORIAL DETERMINANTS:

1.  The project 'Scandal' is an invitation to the artists to express
their views for the social commitment (through the aspects of the
political, ideological, social, ethnical and inter- ethnical,
religious) through the medium of the bill-boards and the theme
'scandal'; 2.  The project 'Scandal' anticipates an involvement of the
phenomena of art of the public (public art) and the opening of the
communicative discourse of the artist with the society and vice versa
(committed art); 3.  The project 'Scandal' is defined as an
exploration of the use of the term scandal in its essential and most
extreme aspects and manifestations as an object and instrument of the
art creation today; 4.  The project 'Scandal' has for an aim to
explore the possibilities and conditions for the existence or
non-existence of the committed art in Macedonia; 5.  The project
'Scandal' has for an aim to explore the possibilities and conditions
for the existence or non-existence of the public art in Macedonia; 6.
The project 'Scandal' has for an aim to determine the character,
structure and phenomenology of the 'commitment' of ~ and of the
'public' in the art creation in Macedonia in the second half of the
nineties; 7.  The project 'Scandal' seeks from the artists to leave
their ateliers and to create a dialogue with the society and its
phenomena; 8.  The project 'Scandal' seeks from the artists a
standpoint about every day occurrences in their social surroundings;
9.  The project 'Scandal' seeks from the artists to place their art
work/project in the direction of expressing a standpoint taking as
coordinates primarily the language of fine-arts and procedures for the
modeling of the statements; 10.  The project 'Scandal', in its
finality, posts the question of existence or [total]non-existence of
the possibility for the installing of such determinants in the
Macedonian recent art production.

- The first part (level) of the project which was to be the organizing of an
 'exhibition' of five selected projects on the Bill-boards in Skopje 
simultaneously on 30 locations by a decission of the Board will not 
take place. After the receiving of the projects the Board
decided that there are not enough projects which are with the 
with the required qualifikative and curatorial determinants
as a prerequisite in order for the exhibition to take place.  
This moment is probably most doubtful 
for the art public. Therefore the Board decided 
to ask the artists for a permission the projects to be on a display
to a larger circle of art theoreticians and critics i.e. instead of 
being realized on the Bill-Boards throughout Skopje to show them in 
the Hall of OSI - Macedonia. 

- The second part (level) will therefore be a TALK between the 
artists, critics, theoreticians and public which will take place on 24.12.1997.
The works of the artists who approved will be shown 
in the Hall of OSI - Macedonia on a smaler format (100 x 70cm).

- The third part (level) will take place in 1998 and will be characterized with 
the organizing of a Symposium  on the theme
Social engagement of the art: manifestos or notes? by foreign and
domestic art theorists. 

The fourth part (level) is the publishing of translations of texts by foreign critics 
and art theorists in the special appendix of the magazine The Large Glass.


3. SCCA project.
Project by Nada Prlja
Institute for Medical Rehabilitation.
26.12.1997


"Walking On Cold Water According To Dr. Knaipp:

"Everyone knows that in dreams, one never sees the sun, even though
one often has the impression of a much more intense light."   
(Nervil)

Can the beautiful be sad? Is beauty, in part, linked to the ephemeral,
and thereby, to sadness? Or is the beautiful object the one  which
tirelessly returns after destruction and war, in order to testify that
survival exists within death, as a testimony to the possibility of
immortality?    (Julia Kristeva)

On healing with the aid of water (according to Dr. Knaipp's manual).

Let us document the factual. The dark and dense sound texture at the
threshold of the three interconnected spaces intended for hydrotherapy
at the Institute for Rehabilitation, expands slowly towards the next
two rooms, describing the viscous atmosphere of this environment.
 In the central space, in the four concrete baths filled with water,
 four female nightdresses lie as symbolic representations of the body,
 but also as a poetic counterpoint to the iron estrangement of the
 space and the elements within it. Printed onto the nightdresses, in
 the region of the chest, or rather, the region of the heart, are four
 drawings portraying four water-healing methods - reproductions from
 the once popular "be-your-own-doctor" type manual by Dr. Knaipp.
Finally, in the third room, above the large metallic bathtub, one more
nightdress is freely suspended. This time, in the region of the chest
- and let us not forget the heart within it - a video image flickers,
which, with a slow paced arrangement of photographic fragments,
encompasses the same space and the elements within it. The musical
background, being the same as that at the entrance, blends with it as
an unsynchronized echo, closing the circle of our real movement (the
movement of our bodies) within the space and transfers us to a new
circle of movement: within the exclusive field of the
visual/pictorial. In a similar fashion to X-rays which, in penetrating
the body, depict the internal being in a strange and bewildering way,
so the video beams in this work by Nada Prlja penetrate the
nightdresses - the clothes for dreaming - making apparent to us  the
sorrow of emptiness, of the broken relation between the internal and
the external world. Leading us anew with her visual interpretations
through the lonely cold corridors of this edifice, which can
simultaneously be seen as a broad metaphor of contemporary society and
of our everyday reality, Prlja discovers/uncovers the inconsolable
melancholy of absence. Overlaying bandages upon the sharp, stark and
virtually barren reality ("realness") of the space, with the help of
the layered intermingling of mediums (Prlja initially processes the
primarily photographic notations through computer manipulation and
digital animation, to thereafter transform it into video inscription),
she softens the forms, deepens the shadows, condenses the colours and
subjectifies the light' which here appears to be without a visible
source, as if coming from nowhere. Her source is within the imaginary,
in the silent melancholy of the intimate experience of the space. Yet,
while following the poetics of melancholy (or perhaps precisely
because of it), does the work by Nada Prjla not lead us to the idea of
the therapeutic effect of the artistic act? The immediate proof of
this would be the metaphorical significance of the Institute for
Rehabilitation, Dr. Knaipp's manual, and finally the occasional
appearance within her video images of the hand touching elements
within the space, associating to the illustrations of Knaipp's healing
methods. The opaque, distanced and self-sufficient beauty of Nada
Prlja's work does not, however, allow us such easy conclusions. In
accordance with the actions of the contemporary artist, she resolves
the conflict, as A.B.Oliva would say, by choosing  "the ideal position
of the betrayer: the position of someone who sees the world but does
not accept it, the position of someone who wants to change the world
but does not act, choosing instead to create an iconography as an
output/input of expressive images which support the critical and
self-reflective intellectual conscience."

Text: Zoran Petrovski