Retrospective exhibition “Road to Volkoderi – Retrospective”, works by the Macedonian artist Simon Uzunovski, Museum of Contemporary Art – Skopje
A team of five art historians, Marika Bochvarova Plavevska, Zoran Petrovski, Ljiljana Nedelkovska, Valentino Dimitrovski, and Lazo Plavevski, close friends of Uzunovski and direct witnesses of his activities since the 70s, presented the work of one of the pioneers of participatory art installations in Macedonia. The associate curator of the exhibition was Blagoja Varoshanec, and conservators Ljupco Iljovski and Jadranka Milchovska also contributed to the preparations.
At the exhibition were presented more than 100 of his works. Among them were objects, figurines, collages, drawings and assemblages, and also applications made with adhesive tape or tape on glass or paper. The latter is the material by which the work of Simon Uzunovski is most often recognizable.
The unique, ephemeral installations, performances, and actions in which Uzunovski involved a wide circle of friends, colleagues, acquaintances, and the public, in the creation or performance of several of his works, were presented with extensive photo documentation. This photo documentation simultaneously showed the way of living in the 70s. In the same time, photographs showed Uzunovski’s enthusiasm and his energy of managing contagiously to spread the idea of the democratization of art. It was not only the democratization of art but, also by its manifestations of everyday life, Uzunovski tried to make the art closer to the people.
“Sime radiated incredible life energy and enthusiasm, with a kind of affirmative, attractive force, around which our generation gravitated. He was always ready to initiate and animate events and incidents, both in everyday life and in the field of art. Sime will remain in the collective professional memory of his fellow travelers and supporters as the most significant representative of conceptual experiences of the 70s here in our country. With his conceptual practices, Sime filled a gap in the development of contemporary art at a time when the late modernist formal patterns of the previous decade were still present on the art scene. In the personal memory of each of us who have had intensive friendly relations with Sime, one sentence he often exploited and emphasized in numerous events will remain for good: “Let’s organize ourselves so that they can develop”, Nedelkovska and Dimitrovski say.
The retrospective exhibition of Uzunovski aims not only to present his work in retrospect but also theoretically to shed light on his exceptional appearance. However, the exhibition focus was on the most significant period for him personally, the seventies of the 20th century. That was a time when alternative artistic practices penetrated the local scene as part of the then-Yugoslav cultural space. Simon Uzunovski is the key figure of these new artistic practices in our cultural environment. With his artistic action, Uzunovski opened a completely different approach to understanding art. It was an art that questioned established conventional linguistic and aesthetic norms of traditional art disciplines.
Uzunovski was active on the scene for almost 50 years, and for many years he worked and lived on the Italian island of Capri.
The most radical artistic breakthroughs were achieved by Simon Uzunovski in the second half of the 1970s with the realization of several exhibitions, actions, and participatory spatial installations, such as those in the Hall of the Faculty of Philosophy (1977 and 1978) within the scope of the Aesthetic Laboratory, then at Kora Gallery (1977), Street Action (1977) and the legendary exhibition/installation in the basement space of Maksim Gorki Street (1978 or 1979). In 1984, he participated in the exhibition “New Appearances in Macedonian Fine Art in the Last Decade”, held in the Youth Center “25th May”, Skopje. In the same year, he realized his solo exhibition/ambient installation in the Youth Center “25th May”. In 1994, his twenty years of work were shown in the Museum of the City of Skopje, and in 1995, 1996, and 1997, he participated in exhibitions in Chifte Amam. Since 2003, his presence in the Museum of Contemporary Art has become more frequent when he becomes part of the project “Idea-theque” (A selection of documents from the conceptual discourse in Macedonia), “Invisible landscape” 2013, “Solidarity – the unfinished project” (The permanent exhibition), 2014 and “The main points of Macedonian fine art in the 70s and 80s” in 2020. With his tireless energy, readiness for action, and openness to involvement in contemporary art trends, Uzunovski was also present in recent years in the alternative breakthroughs of some of the younger generations of artists, gathered around informal collective action, the initiative “Cooperation” and their activity faced criticism of the institutional and ideologically and politically determined cultural policy.
From the end of the 70s and during the 80s, Uzunovski was one of the first collaborators to the set-designer Krste Jidrov-Dzibi. They worked together on about 15 set-designs, and the tenth edition of Young Open Theater – MOT was opened specifically with their joint exhibition.