NAÐA KRAČUNOVIĆ: In the Name of Mother, in the Surname of Father

On September 5, at 20:00 hours, solo exhibitions will be opened at the Skopje Museum of Contemporary Art of the young artists Serhat Emrulai and Nađa Kračunović, winners of the “Most Successful Author and Work” award, awarded to them last year at the 14th International Biennial of Young Artists entitled as “Awakenings”.

The curators of these exhibitions are Iva Dimovski, Bojana Janeva and Nikola Uzunovski.

This award is in fact a solo exhibition at the Skopje Museum of Contemporary Art awarded to two authors for their works.

The young artist Emrulai won the last year’s Biennial with his installation “In-Between”, while the young artist Kračunović is the winner of the award for her video performance “Hydra”.

On September 5, Nađa Kračunović will present herself with the solo exhibition “In the Name of Mother, in the Surname of Father” and with the live performance “In Your Name”. The text for this performance is signed by Nađa Kračunović and Ivana Maričić, who also participates in the performance itself. The costumes for the performance are by Luna Shalamon and Valentina Wenzel.

She explores the museum as a radical place, where tradition meets modern married life, as resistance rather than social norm, including the intergenerational mother-daughter relationship. Kračunović deals with the female inheritance from both parents and offers strategies for survival in patriarchal societies, which treat the act of marriage as an act of resistance.

Nađa Kračunović (Serbia, Belgrade, 1996) is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Weimar, Germany, where she graduated from the Master’s Program “Public Art and New Artistic Strategies”. Combining different media, Kračunović creates works specific to the location and context, using fictional narratives, humor, storytelling, performative poetry and her own voice, present in her video performances, sound works, objects and writings. Her works deal with everyday fiction, as well as the spaces and bodies that are part of it: individual bodies, female bodies, alter egos; scenes in public spaces; and various social constructs and phenomena. By having experience with theater, she creates experiences that lead the audience into the protagonist’s world, always having a bittersweet note. In addition to her solo exhibitions in Serbia and Germany, Kračunović has exhibited in over 30 group exhibitions throughout Europe, and her works were exhibited in the Bauhaus Museum in Weimar and the art collections of Chemnitz. She has participated in many interdisciplinary art projects and workshops, including AirR Free Radicals at the Floating University of Berlin and the Heritage for Communities DAAD workshop in Cairo, Egypt. In 2022, she participated in Documenta 15 as part of the Cooking Conflicts Collective in Kassel and Belgrade Youth Biennal with “Future Nostalgia FM”, an imaginary, never-ending radio station that she founded in 2021.

Poster photo: Rodriguez Sade. Her project is supported by the EU. The positions expressed in her works are not a reflection of the European Union’s official opinion.

The exhibition is supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of N. Macedonia, Goethe Institute, the EU and MoCA’s long-time friend, Tikveš.