THE HORSES’ LEGS ARE TOO SHORT

Opening: 24.11.2014 (Monday), 7 p.m. / artist talk: 6 p.m.
Location: Remont Gallery, Marsala Birjuzova, Belgrade, Serbia
The exhibition will be open until 29.11.2014

Igor TOSHEVSKI / OPA (Slobodanka STEVCESKA & Denis SARAGINOVSKI) /
Oliver MUSOVIK / Filip JOVANOVSKI / Nikola UZUNOVSKI / Gjorgje JOVANOVIK / 
Vladimir JANCHEVSKI

Frequent attempts to narrow down and eradicate the facility for an open debate and the visible repercussions of any anti-disciplinary act, manifest the embodiment of a long perceived crisis of rationality and the brutal instrumentalisation of its communicative potential. It is a tendency that, through local quasi-interpretations and prominent authoritarian tendencies disguised as a necessity, can only lead into a new era, which would present an actual anti-human dystopia for the common citizen.

Artists are confronted with a serious challenge to defend this common space because the actual public sphere is a vital condition for the implementation of a democracy. However, the struggle for autonomy here does not refer only to the self-sufficiency of art disciplines in relation to specific artistic media or its internal logic – a cul-de-sac that the modern teleological conception of art led us to. Rather, it signifies something much more rudimentary and universal, and that is the sovereign democratic right to be socially engaged, accountable, to express the willingness to supply propositions and to criticize. The right of free thinking and a reasoned struggle for one’s personal opinions is the essential condition for life in a community, even as a completely fragmented reality, or at least for an unobstructed and equal partaking within that same physical space.

Based on the premise that the autonomy of contemporary artists is socially conditioned, Kooperacija attempts to overcome the position of marginalization and powerlessness precisely within the public sphere by stepping beyond the boundaries of the art world and frequently in defiance of simplified messages regularly conducted from centers where political and economic powers intersect through proven effective mechanisms. Revisiting the unenviable position of the artist as a paradigm for disobedience and resistance, as well as the undesirability of any critical thought in society with noticeable tendencies towards gradual postponement or even elimination of the political, the artists in Kooperacija individually, as well as through continued collaboration, try to actualize disputed “galloping” values which, without a broad consensus are being disseminated through Macedonia’s cultural infrastructure.

With the exhibition The Horses’ Legs are Too Short [1] Kooperacija makes an overview of previous attempts to problematize contemporary social phenomena by allocating intersecting points of critically oriented art and the mechanisms of propaganda, as well as addressing the dangers and consequences of the possible reoccurrence of grand narratives which often result in unrestrained nationalist outbursts. The artists presented in the exhibition display works that are a (direct) response to the one-way instrumentalized mechanisms and their centralized cultural policies as a source of radical division and severe confrontations within Macedonian society. Through these works, which document their aesthetic and moral positions, the artists reject a simplified ironic detachment from a troubled reality by challenging this same reality, utilizing diverse yet visibly convergent strategies and procedures, from open critique to the simulation of exaggerated identifications, all in an attempt to expose the socio-political context and delegitimize the dominant imposed discourse.

[1] The Horses Legs are Too Short – graffiti that appeared on the building of the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Macedonia, soon after proposing the first models of equestrian monuments designed for the project “Skopje 2014″.