Skopje, 27 November 2024 (MIA) - An exhibition entitled “Broken Time. And the World is Made Again by What it Forgets.” will open on Thursday evening at Skopje's Museum of Contemporary Arts (MoCA) as part of activities marking the Museum's 60th anniversary. It will be on display through March 30, 2025.

The exhibition is curated by MoCA’s curatorial team: Ivana Vaseva, Blagoja Varoshanec, Sofia Grigoriadou, Iva Dimovski, Vladimir Janchevski, and Nada Prlja.

According to the Museum, the exhibition is a representative selection of works from the Museum’s collection, some of which have rarely or never been exhibited. 

“Most of the exhibited works are by artists originating from what has been understood as the ‘peripheries’ of the world from the perspective of a Eurocentric ‘geopolitics of knowledge,’ as well as works by contemporary artists connected to those regions. This selection attempts to locate different stories, often excluded from the dominant narratives, but nevertheless possessing great emancipatory power,” the Museum said. 

According to the organizers, the general idea of the exhibition is to reexamine historical and critical themes such as colonial history and neocolonialism, feminism, hegemonic exploitation, the hybridity of cultural formations and transformations and the corresponding resistances and struggles, as well as the complex realities of countries (and groups) that are conceptualized as “peripheral.”  

“Broken Time, responding to the task of inheritance, opens up space for works of art, stories, and ghosts that have not been equally exhibited, imagining possible future readings of the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art – Skopje, which will inevitably be haunted by the past,” they said.

The contemporary artists whose works will be displayed at the exhibition are Inas Halabi (Palestine/Netherlands), Syowia Kyambi (Kenya/Germany), Ivana Sidjimovska (North Macedonia/Germany), Ala Younis (Kuwait/Jordan), and Carla Zaccagnini (Brazil/Sweden)

Some of the works of the museum collection that are part of the exhibition are by the renowned artists Maria Bonomi, Roberto Matta, Aída Carballo, Félix Beltrán, but as well as by Remo Bianchedi, Roberto Valcárcel, Samson Flexor, Fayga Ostrower, Anésia Pacheco e Chaves, Gerty Saruê, Peter Clarke, Max Aruquipa Chambi, Maria Auxiliadora Silva and others. 

“The exhibition consists of works from the MoCA-Skopje collection that originate from the Global South—bearing in mind that it is a heterogeneous and deterritorialized category—or those that do not participate in the global market from a hegemonic position. The exhibited works have been archived under a national umbrella, originating from Argentina, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Morocco, Mexico, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, South Africa, Venezuela among others. Works by artists from these countries but active elsewhere are also included. They are put in dialogue, on the one hand, with works from the countries of the former Yugoslavia (North Macedonia, Kosovo, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro) as heirs to the Non-Aligned Movement politics and its legacy, that are especially active in the realm of culture. On the other hand, the exhibited works are in dialogue with works by contemporary artists who critically question local and global hegemonies,” the Museum said.

According to the Museum, the works by the invited contemporary artists (Younis, Halabi, Kyambi, Zaccagnini and Sidzimovska) that have been selected for this exhibition are not meant to be experienced isolated, but offer the opportunity for ongoing dialogues among them and with the exhibited works from the collection of the MoCA-Skopje.

“Postcoloniality, political action and artistic forms of resistance, women’s bodies, perspectives and production, environmental destruction and colonial extraction, haunted colonial and modern narratives, modernist thought and architecture, forms of solidarity and deconstructions of the national, are some of the themes that the artists address. These themes are not exclusive, as more than one can be traced in each work. Bringing the works of the collection in relation with works by contemporary artists creates a potential framework for contextual and critical stories of postcolonial solidarity, transformative emancipation and collaboration. It is also an attempt to potentially establish a different representative anti-hegemonic identity for the museum,” the Museum said.

The graphic design and artistic intervention for the exhibition has been done by Iliana Petrushevska, exhibition design is by architects Jovan Ivanovski and Ana Ivanovska. Ljupcho Iljovski and Jadranka Milchovska are the conservators involved in the exhibition, and Tihomir Topuzovski is involved as a concept collaborator. 

Photo: MoCA