Jana Jakimovska: Retro-Corporal Retrospective

Jana Jakimovska’s Retro: Corporal Retrospectives exhibition has a multimedia approach and consists of pieces belonging to various recent periods of her work.

“Retro: Corporal Retrospectives is a glance back at myself as a human, a social being, a woman, a mother, and an artist. The body is in the center of this exhibition, but the body as a metaphor for the human, the profane, the uncomfortable: the body ages, it gains weight; the body copulates and gives birth; the body bleeds and dies; the body should be covered, should be punished. Where do I draw the line between my body and myself? What is ‘I’, and what is the body? How should my body and I feel in various emotional and social contexts? Whom does the body owe to, and whom does it answer to? ‘Retro…’ doesn’t tend to be a retrospective exhibition because it isn’t – it merely recycles and re-contextualizes some already seen concepts, in an attempt to find the answers to the questions above.”
Jana Jakimovska, artist

“Feminism in the field of visual art in Macedonia can be observed through a small number of individual artistic engagements that address the ongoing issues using various methodologies and neologisms. One of the most consistent representatives of this current in the Macedonian contemporary scene is of course the artist Jana Jakimovska and her contribution – namely, almost all of her body of work created in the past 20 years has been devoted to treating various issues related to gender equality and social inclusion of women in today’s ‘contemporary’ and ‘democratic’ society. One of the main characteristics of Jakimovska’s feminist approach is the inclusion of all senses in the act of observing, and successively, tearing down the wall between the subject and the object.”

Ana Frangovska, curator

Jana Jakimovska was born in Skopje in 1981. She got her BFA (2005) and MFA (2009) degrees at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Skopje. Besides painting, she engages in digital art, mural painting, photography, installations, graphic design, illustration, and performance. A significant part of her recent work focuses on the matters of the body, the self, sexuality, and the position of women in today’s societies. She has had 20 solo exhibitions in Berlin, New York, Belgrade, Prishtina, Skopje, Gevgelija, Kumanovo, and Shtip. She has taken part in over 80 group exhibitions in USA, Germany, Italy, Lithuania, Turkey, Greece, Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, and North Macedonia. She has participated in 18 art symposiums in Greece, Croatia, Serbia, and Macedonia. At the moment she works as an associate professor at the Art Academy at University Goce Delchev in Shtip.