Ana Frangovska, PhD, curator
After several decades of living and working in Venice, the Macedonian artist Ljupka Deleva will proudly present her latest project “Transformations – Flusso – Flux: 1998–2025”; the project is of retrospective and critical nature. The exhibition is a multimedia archive of her creative opus, which includes photographs, videos, performative actions, aquarelle paintings, drawings, interventions and other visual experiments. It is particularly important to note that most of these projects will be exhibited for the very first time in front of the home audience, thus paving the way for a more complex visual and conceptual analysis of transformations in the artistic practice.
The project explores the transformation of identity from the perspective of transnationalism, hybridity and post-migratory subjectivity. Identity is articulated as a process of permanent construction and reconfiguration, where the act of acquiring new citizenship serves as an institutionalised gesture that impacts the subject’s self-perception – a symbolic “new layer” that guides and structures the dynamics of belonging and non-belonging.
Deleva explores the dual position of the modern migrant, who is simultaneously an emigrant (from the moment he leaves his homeland) and an immigrant (adapting to his new cultural environment). She manages to articulate this dichotomy as a critical axis of the postmodern and postcolonial subjectivity, adhering to the concept of Homi Bhabha pertaining to the in-between space и cultural hybridity, as well as Stuart Hall’s notion of cultural identity as a constantly evolving process.
The project reflects on migration not only as a geographical relocation, but as an ontological and aesthetic condition: the identity is in a constant flux wedged between cultures, social roles and gender positions. The dichotomy between “origin” and the “new environment” also reflects the theoretical discussion on diasporic identity (Safran 1991; Clifford 1994), which explores the ambivalence between belonging and affiliation, as well as the productivity of cultural hybridity.
Beyond its transnational dimension, the project also explores gender and social aspects of identity, particularly the conflicting role of a citizen, a mother and an artist as well as its interaction with the postmodern and postcolonial frame of a hybrid identity. The exhibition thus unfolds as a critical reflection of opposition and contradiction, a constant reconfiguration of subjectivity and visual articulation of the personal and collective process of identification.
In that sense, “Transformations– Flusso – Flux: 1998–2025” articulates the universal condition of the modern migrant: fluid, hybrid, contextually constructed, constantly in the process of critical and aesthetic reinterpretation, positioning itself within the in-between space of cultures, nations and social roles.
Референци:
• Bhabha, H. K. (1994). The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.
• Hall, S. (1990). “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. London: Lawrence & Wishart.
• Safran, W. (1991). “Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return.” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, 1(1), 83–99.
• Clifford, J. (1994). Diasporas. Cultural Anthropology, 9(3), 302–338.
• Said, E. (1993). Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf.