(Initiative KOOPERACIJA, Skopje, June 24-28, 2014)
The exhibition Anomalies basically deals with various aspects of the complex interrelations between image and text, the definition and analysis of borderline positions and points of intersection of these two dominant representational modes that are both complementary and contradictory, but always interdependent.
The works, alternately elaborated between 2011-2014 are outlined as ‘diagrams’ for further elaboration of methodological reflections concerning the verbal and the visual, and simultaneously ‘in constant search of their discourse,’ positioned in the border-zones of visual art, art theory, art criticism, art-historical hermeneutics, critical theory, visual studies and image theory.
One of the starting points is the thesis that art, after the enormous extension of the scope of its notion, is a positive and necessary system ‘anomaly’, and a model for in-disciplinarity, especially when it is put in function of uncovering of social irregularities, such that are imposing normativity.
In an era of enormous saturation with images and its absolute domination imposed through technological development, a period defined as ‘pictorial/iconic turn’, and a time when the post-production features of art are intensifying, the idea/intention is to stress the importance of the control in the process of signification and hence the artist’s responsibility in choosing. The question that arises is whether the field of contemporary art can be a solid base for the development of a “new iconology” which will insist on merging the separate domains of theory and practice, basing it on a cyclical process of generating “images” which themselves will be processed as a matter of further analysis and generate new ones that will go beyond the frame initially given.
The relationship between the choice of practices which are in fact games based on alterations, crossing codes, especially the interest for the anagrams on the one hand and the concept of the limits of interpretation on the other, is not accidental. Thus, the anagramic destabilization presented in Anagramic Logical Square (2014) and constructed on a particular binary (traitor – patriot), is directed toward problematizing and rejection of the simplified binary logic that imposes itself as a social norm at different levels.
The interventions in the works are often based on destabilizations of existing simple iconographic and textual constructions, but such that are aimed at exposing their inherent potential for a “counter-effect”. It is also reflected in the relation between the images and the titles as their basic frame, while using them to thematize some of the complex social phenomena, such as the tendency of the dominant discourse that is “profiling/framing” our reality (Construction for a Classical Capital, 2013), the “Name issue” and the tries to achieve a “reasonable compromise”, “without additions and adjectives” (Anagramatica series , 2011-2014), then the mechanisms of cultural institutions through which the system reproduces itself as the norm, of anonymity and breaking out the frame as a metaphor for in-disciplinarity (Play with Classical Capital, 2014) etc.
The intention is not only to deconstruct what is thematized, but also to reveal the mechanisms that make possible the creation and circulation of certain problematic images and perpetuate their effectiveness.
Vladimir Janchevski,
Skopje, June 2014