Personal Politics

Location: boul. 8 September, 4 (groundfloor space), Skopje
Opening: 29. 06. 2012, Friday / 21:00 
The exhibition will be open every day in the period od 30.06-03.07 
from 18:00 till 21.00

Ines Efremova, Snezana Altiparmak, Dijana Bogdanovska, Nemanja Cvijanovic,
Boris Shemov, Vladimir Jancevski, Marcelo Brajnovic, Velimir Zernovski,
Harald Schenker, Nikola Uzunovski, Simon Uzunovski, Gjorgje Jovanovik,
OPA (Slobodanka Stevceska & Denis Saraginovski), Filip Jovanovski, Igor Toshevski 

 

Politics and art have many crossing points. Politics is determined by a defined course of action adopted for the purpose of efficiently achieving specific goals. In the broadest sense, they are synonymous, especially considering the communication aspect of art. Opinions on what makes art political vary from those maintaining that art in general is always engaged, to those who argue that it consists of explicit messages scribbled on the walls of a “conflict zone”. What is evident though, is that corresponding to contemporary occurrences, artists are able in asserting certain political views through their art, just as they are capable to act within any other social structure. However, when confronted with the artwork, the question of how to approach it remains: is it a subjective, personal point of the author, or do we perceive it according to the effect that it renders upon us?

Personal Politics is an attempt to encourage reflection upon the boundaries and interdependence between the personal/ private versus the collective/ public. It is a challenge to re-examine artistic positions, the parameters of artistic autonomy and the constant efforts of the artist to become open to the world, corresponding to the need to preserve the particular. The hermeneutics and indistinctness of the individual, personal expression, metaphorically speaking, are the wall and the door, because they both inevitably contain the potential for establishing a communication. Relatively speaking, syntax remains undefined, but it is vocabulary (the overall verbal-visual fundus of elements in correlation to the work) that is at least partially understood and shared by everyone.

There is no private, personal language, at least not one that would make any sense. Among other things, the purpose is to point out the multitude of different approaches to diverse issues and various strategies for bridging differences, excluding the undertaking for their complete cancellation. Personal Politics tries to present and/ or criticize specific relationships between individuals, between the individual and the collective, and the correlation between the individual and the featureless system, built and revised/ modified by individuals; a system containing universal relations between individuals as a result of personal policies. It is precisely this personal policy of the artists and their attempt to act through art, which provides a foundation for establishing a contact, and ultimately a one-way or reciprocal communication, depending on the recipient.

Kooperacija would like to thank Filip Spasovski for putting the space at our disposal.