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Darko Aleksovski: Landscapes of Astonishment

02/04/2022- 26/05/2022

 

This project is a complex presentation of the search and wandering through everyday life, the emotional processes of falling in love and unrequited love, as well as the constant longing for new unfulfilled ways of remembering.

“In this cycle of drawings, the artist creates a warm and poetic-lyrical ambience, being inspired by everyday themes. It is about inner feeling and discovery, and it visually builds it into a system of squares. The imaginary play of real objects and everyday harmonious forms, with their mutual relations and contrasts make a separate world within the composition of the drawing and the whole installation”, says Iva Dimovski.
It is followed by the curator Vladimir Janchevski, who believes that the works in this exhibition by Aleksovski, open the possibility for more directional and deeper reading of the relations between the artist’s imagination and the reality in which it is realized.
“Through the use of different media in the exhibition, which is contextualized and adapted for the specific exhibition space of MoCA-Skopje, the artistr enables reading of both the individual works and the whole, which are positioned at the border points of the visual and the narrative, indicating the specific complementary relation of image and text”, says Janhcevski.

Artist statement

Landscapes of astonishment[1] is a narrative and research based art project, consisting of three separate segments, which complement each other formally and in a narrative manner. The project supplements my current artistic interest, titled Places for daydreaming, and it originates from feelings of enchantment and falling in love with specific places and journey as a method of amazement from everyday life, which it treats as utopian allusions to “overcome the limitations of a disconnecting presence that allows us to see a different time and place”[2] . Landscapes of astonishment is a complex display of the search and wander through the mundane everyday life, the emotional processes of falling in love and unrequited love, and the constant yearning for new yet to be attained ways of remembering.

A Small Handbook for Daydreaming, series of digitally printed publications on paper, tied together with a needle and a thread, by hand or sewing machine; variable dimensions (each 10.5 x 14.8 cm)

The three segments of the entire project are: A Small Handbook for Daydreaming (Мал прирачник за мечтаење) – current series of independently released artistic prints; Constantly Unfolding Scenes from Everyday Life (Сцени од секојдневниот живот што постојано се одвиткуваат) – a series of pieces dealing with the fragmentation and the fleeting nature of everyday life landscapes; and A Horizon Which Cannot Be Seen, but Can Be Imagined (Хоризонт што не може да се види, но може да се замисли) – a series of collages shown on an analogue projector that address memories of the horizon which essentially is a place that is beyond reach. The pieces of the three segments are allusions for a multilayered reflection of pieces of my imagination and their connection to reality in which they actually take place. In that sense, the proposed series of pieces in various mediums as well as the specific contextual display in the museum space adjusted for their interpretation are formed at the intersection between visual arts and written narrative as a narrative tool.


[1] Landscapes of astonishment is a phrase taken from the introduction of Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity that José Muñoz used to contextualize the poetry of Frank O’Hara.

[2] Muñoz, José Esteban (2009) Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York and London: New York University Press.

The exhibition is curated by: Iva Dimovski, Vladimir Janchevski and Blagoja Varoshanec.

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