Robert Jankuloski’s artistic expression can freely be described by the syntagm and metaphor “a different view”. This title, taken from the long term project of the Macedonian Centre for Photography indicates an action in the impoverished field of “artistic authenticity” today, filled with the multiplicative usage of the photographic medium, suitable for creating various narrative. Within this positioning of the artistic work here, Jankuloski has permanently persisted in his projects on taking the position of “a different view”, insisting on moving and decentering the structures that shape the recognition of the reality, but also the photographic image. Starting from the established visual narratives he nests on their periphery and “parasites” in the pleasure of the different viewpoint.
It has been long concluded that the conceptual matrix of his projects comes down to two basic modes of artistic expression. The first one is the distanced indication of the segments of the current social reality in the manner of concluding “engagement” (within this dimension one can see his projects 1998 “See You See Me” and 2001 “12 Silver Soldiers”). The second mode is viewed in using small narrative expressions in an atmosphere of intimate staging of subjectivity, most impressively present in a number of his projects: 2000 “Let Us Preserve the Memories”, 2009 “Movement”, 2010 “NATURA MORTA” together with Monika Moteska and others. With this conception mode in his work, Jankuloski has always staged the position of a small (minimal) empty space from which the expression of the narration unwinds. This “empty space” is paradoxical and “parasite” although it is the basic “narrator” that enables the course of various stories: in “Let Us Preserve the Memories” it is the photographic prop – the chair, in “Movement” it is the invisible in the enlarged photographic and film shot, while in the current project “View from the Window” it is the invisible window from which the narrative segments of the view are open. It is the static point that works like the psychoanalytic “sewing stitch” which profiles a diverse staging of the view with the one-dimensional view.
“View from the Window View” project was implemented in 2012 in Paris, and it is inspired by the photograph with the same title made by one of the founders of photography and photographic medium, the French photographer Joseph Nicéphore Niépce. It is the first registered photograph made as a view through a window, overlooking the suburban panorama. This exceptionally important photograph – heliograph made in 1826 and the first registered view of the “objective reality” with the medium in creation is taken by Jankuloski as the starting point during his residence in Paris, setting this punctual angle and view of a banal sight of the city. Paris has always been an endless treasure of epochal and monumental visions and sights via which the modern urban universe of the civil society and civilization was codified. Paris “spleen” was the unavoidable ‘Babylon matrix” in which the modern urban magma was shaped with its many factures and configurations. As opposed to this, Jankuloski focuses and limits himself on an ordinarily banal, and even bizarre view, tracing the origins of the modern “photographic view”: the view of the non-profiled side of a facility in the city, with a diffusely marked street background and ambience that can refer to any suburb of any European city, even Skopje. However, Jankuloski does not need the “big city lights”, but the small bizarre views and stories of the city in the different time, light, atmospheric, and even subjective angles, where the “events” take place in a “day-night”, although the photographs were made during a number of days. He limits himself to the micrological features of the ambience in correlation with the subjective mood and he looks for the numerous moments in which the monotonous view is always offered in a different way, depending on the parameters of recording and the recorded parameters. Day and night, light and darkness, humidity and dryness, black and white and color and many other invisible features break the solidity of the banal sameness and make the view playful before the eyes of the mute “narrator” in the background – the window and its view. The minimalistically treated aspects of the view, in open contrast with the monumental visions about the urban universe of the former European metropolis further discover numerous layers of meanings in the endless narration game.