To Begin, Once Again
One cannot speak of the beginning and the end without engaging in a deep debate about the context and the network of relations. If the end is at the beginning, then we really have nothing else to do but continue. The beginning of the 20th century was marked by a series of dramatic events and turning points in political and technological, but also in artistic terms, making their inevitable interdependence obvious. Instead of serving the ruling elites, the modern concept of the artist opened up space for individual expression outside the control of the metanarrative of power.
Visual culture in the expanded field is today inevitably considered in the context of the emergence of photomontage and the mass distribution of printed media – its use in a clearly and precisely defined political commentary, most often understood as visual (non)artistic interventions.
Through several segments that focus on different thematic units and periods, it aims to actualize some of the debates about the power and function of the image and the role of visual culture. The specific processes of control of visual content and their interpretation are explored, and especially the ways in which creative processes of image-making can be critically engaged in the direction of regenerating the social sphere and protecting the common public good in specific complex historical and political moments.
The exhibition features works by a large number of artists such as John Heartfield and his contemporaries Josep Renau, Manuel Monleon, Boris Klinch, but also the next generation represented by Hector Cattolica, Klaus Staeck, Peter Kennard, Claude Baillargeon… The exhibition also includes works from the collection of the MoCA-Skopje, which have not been exhibited in the context of their specific authentic reaction to the socio-political situation, such as those by Joan Rabascall, Kwak Duck-Jun, Lino Fiocchi, Petar Lubarda, and others. In addition to them, works by important contemporary artists such as Armando Lulaj, OPA Group, Igor Tоshevski, Gjorgje Jovanоvik, Filip Jovanovski, Nemanja Cvijanovic, Tomato Košir, The Yes Men…
* Selection from the collection of curator Vladimir Janchevski, which includes: books, posters, magazines, cards, photographs, graphics and other publications and printed materials.
Curator and text: Vladimir Janchevski
Production Coordinator: Ljupcho Iljovski (Conservator, MoCA)
Colaborators for MoCA Collection: Iva Dimovski, Blagoja Varoshanec
Exhibition Design: Igor Toshevski and Vladimir Janchevski
Coordination: Fanol Ademi
Technical Implementation: Jordan Arsovski (MoCA), Marjan Gjorgjiev (NG), Marko Petrushevski
Graphic Design: Iliana Petrushevska
The Project is financially supported by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of the Republic of North Macedonia
Exhibition by Igor Toshevski and OPA (Obsessive Possessive Aggression)
__operation: At Last!
Operational Actions upon the Endless Staring at the Wall of History
It is striking that today, although we constantly hear the claim that “nothing can be done,” everything nevertheless continues to function. Institutions operate, exhibitions open, artworks proliferate, museums collect and display, crises deepen, armed conflicts escalate, while history itself appears strangely immobilized. The problem is no longer the end of history, but the feeling that we continue indefinitely, without direction or purpose. This condition is perhaps even more unsettling than the prospect of an ultimate catastrophe. It is as if we have found ourselves trapped in a uncanny Beckettian loop.
For a long time now, contemporary art has been expected to be politically effective, socially engaged, ethically responsible, economically sustainable, and institutionally relevant, all without fundamentally questioning the very conditions under which it operates. In the current crisis of legitimacy, these demands have become increasingly paradoxical, since art can no longer reclaim the Romantic position of the autonomous artwork as a privileged site of truth. Nor can it fully rely on Brecht’s famous imperative that art should function as a hammer with which to shape the world. But what happens when that hammer itself ceases to work? Once again, we find ourselves standing before the persistent questions of truth and functionality.
Yet some artists continue to persist. Not because they still believe they can save the world, but because persistence itself becomes a way of testing the limits of what appears inevitable—of the exhausted present that Mark Fisher described as capitalist realism. If art still possesses any critical function today, it may lie in interrupting the operational routines through which the present endlessly reproduces itself. Even the smallest hesitation, a (mis)translation, a displacement, or a disruption of the expected, can open a crack in the surface of a reality that constantly insists there is no alternative.
Today, however, the world itself increasingly resembles a vast operational apparatus. What can art do when images no longer exist primarily to be seen, but to guide drones, train algorithms, analyse faces and bodies, and make decisions? The algorithmic logic of code tends to eliminate anomalies, narrowing the space in which art can still operate. The question is therefore no longer whether art will become a tool—or even a weapon—but how it might render visible the mechanisms that are already functioning seamlessly beneath the surface.
Perhaps art today is neither a mirror nor a hammer. Nor does it resemble the darkroom in which the world’s hidden images slowly emerge. What Walter Benjamin described as photography’s optical unconscious may now be expanded into a contemporary operational unconscious: a tautological network of protocols, institutional routines, languages, databases, algorithms, and economies of attention that silently shape our perception. From this perspective, Interruption in Progress emerges at a particularly timely moment. Rather than representing reality—or explicitly seeking to change it—the artists investigate its operational network. Their concern is not what things mean, but how they function.
Interruption in Progress brings together works by Igor Toshevski and OPA (Obsessive Possessive Aggression), revealing both the continuity and complementarity of their artistic practices, as well as the extended lives of artworks through processes of recontextualization and reinterpretation.
OPA’s Leonardo or Michelangelo? (2012), presented through a series of photographs accompanied by a curious textual reflection, explores regimes of visibility and exclusion within the art world. Rather than producing an exhibition, OPA constructs an event whose actual subject is media circulation, exclusivity, invitations, rumours, and the desire to belong—or the frustration of remaining excluded. Here, the artwork unfolds as a communicative protocol, exposing how symbolic value can be generated even without a direct encounter with the work itself. More than a decade later, the photographs remain ambiguous traces of an event, reopening speculation about what may—or may not—have taken place. Dear Jehona and Vladimir, This Box Contains 5,000 Denars (2018) brings together ideas of the gift, money, trust, and personal relationships. Rather than representing an economy of value, the work performs it. Never previously exhibited, it asks where the artwork itself is actually located, demonstrating that value does not reside solely in the object, but emerges through its potentiality and through the network of relations activated by the gesture itself. In doing so, it becomes an ironic reflection on the entanglement of the artworld and money.
With Between II (2026), Igor Toshevski continues the investigation initiated in Between (2016), shifting it toward an even less visible layer of the museum. Rather than beginning with the artworks themselves and their concealment, the project takes as its point of departure the inventory descriptions of selected works from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Skopje. These administrative texts, originally produced for documentation, generate entirely new images through artificial intelligence models. The project does not seek to reconstruct the artworks they describe; instead, it explores the imperfect yet productive translations between language and image. What emerges is a new visual object, born from the misunderstanding between human description and machine interpretation. In the installation Every Statement Builds a Room (2011/2016), Toshevski further suggests that language no longer produces only images, but space itself. Inspired by Ludwig Wittgenstein’s understanding that language is not a mirror of the world but a condition for its appearance through use, the work consists of a red carpet concealing an unknown object beneath its surface. Every statement opens a possibility for meaning while simultaneously producing its own blind spot. Beneath every articulation something inevitably remains that cannot be fully expressed.
OPA’s most recent intervention, A Detour from History, consists of a large-scale photograph depicting an almost imperceptible detail: the vertical handle of a specific entrance door accompanied by the simple bilingual instruction, pull. Isolated from its architectural context, this functional element becomes a site of uncertainty. The imperative invites action, yet without revealing either direction or destination. Within the context of the exhibition and the institutional space of the museum, A Detour from History does not suggest an escape from history, but confronts us with the absurdity of its automatic continuation. It quietly poses a simple yet unsettling question: is it still possible to deviate from a predetermined trajectory? And if so, how? Especially when there is a wall standing directly before us.
This is precisely why the exhibition is installed in the foyer of the Museum of Contemporary Art—the place where the institutional mechanism begins to operate long before one enters the exhibition itself. The foyer—or, if one prefers, the lobby—inevitably evokes the notion of lobbying: the invisible mechanisms of influence, negotiation, and the production of value. Here, the museum is anything but a neutral container; it functions as an almost invisible operational system. Rather than occupying the museum’s principal exhibition galleries, Interruption in Progress appears on their threshold, strategically positioned in the one place that simply cannot be bypassed. Within this operational space, the works by OPA and Igor Toshevski can be experienced as distinct artistic propositions, but also as investigative points through which contemporary art examines the mechanisms that produce visibility, value, and meaning. Taken together, these five works trace a particular map of operations concerned with visibility, exchange, translation, concealment, and anticipation. They do not merely illustrate theory—they set it in motion. One may therefore recognize echoes of Martin Heidegger and his “broken hammer,” Bertolt Brecht’s hammer, Walter Benjamin, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s linguistic worlds, the tradition of institutional critique associated with Hans Haacke and Andrea Fraser, Hito Steyerl’s operational images, and Trevor Paglen’s machine vision. Yet these names are not invoked as authorities capable of explaining or legitimizing the artworks. They function instead as conceptual coordinates within a field in which artistic practice no longer aspires simply to represent reality or oppose it directly, but to expose, interrupt, and occasionally redirect the operations through which reality itself is continually constituted.
Certainly, Interruption in Progress does not describe a fixed condition. The vitality of language reveals that interruption and continuity are neither stable nor mutually exclusive; perhaps each already contains the other. The exhibition thus becomes an ironic commentary on a condition in which we endlessly await something decisive to happen while the mechanisms themselves continue to operate uninterrupted. Its significance lies precisely in rendering visible what usually remains concealed: the processes through which images are produced, institutions function, values are constituted, and the very conditions of perception are shaped. If art still possesses a critical role today, it is perhaps neither to mirror the world nor to transform it through a single decisive gesture. It need be neither mirror, nor hammer, nor darkroom. Instead, it may function as a dynamic field of interaction that allows us, at least momentarily, to perceive the invisible operational systems that organize our reality. Art retains its meaning insofar as it occasionally succeeds in producing small interruptions within the relentless continuity of things.
Vladimir Janchevski
Igor Toshevski treats art as a functional tool for deconstructing power structures, questioning the complex intersection between political authority, the post-socialist context and freedom of expression. Through projects such as “Dossier”, “Commitment” and “Territories”, he systematically problematizes state propaganda, censorship and the limits of institutional exhibiting. He often uses mass media to question the concept of originality and ownership over collective visual history, locating meaning in the relationship between information (text) and its visual carrier (image).
OPA (Obsessive Possessive Aggression) is an artistic collaboration founded by visual artists Slobodanka Stevceska and Denis Saraginovski. Operating at the intersection of context-specificity, the potential of public space, the public sphere, and the language of marketing, OPA employs interventions, tactical media, mockumentaries, and strategies of subversive affirmation to critically interrogate social, ideological, and institutional structures of power. Through a number of its projects, OPA uses art as a platform for public debate, creating situations that deliberately blur the boundaries between fiction and reality, and between art and politics.
Cover photo: OPA, Detour from History, 2026, digital print
Against the force of necessity that organizes the dominant social and political order, this exhibition proposes that we think (with) the body as anarchic – as a living, dynamic, and thinking materiality that cannot be reduced to a stable identity, function, or form. Rather than an individualized and privatized unity, the body here becomes a process: fragmented, ruptured, exposed to other bodies, technologies, and environments, in a constant state of becoming.
The newly created works by the artists explore precisely this field of instability. The body emerges as relation, as affect, as glitch, as line, as fold, as an open structure that refuses to close in on itself. Rather than representation, these works offer abstractions of corporeality. Not as a distancing from the body, but as its dispersal into multiple possibilities of (co)emergence.
Inspired by queer, feminist, and decolonial perspectives, the exhibition evokes lesser-known, half-forgotten, or even risky archives, figures, and forms of life, including: the wild, wilderness, and the disruption of desire in a post-natural, prosthetic, and anti-teleological world; various trans* bodies, dissidents of the sex-gender system, as well as deviant eroticisms; dildo countersexuality and embodied gender experiments; the extravagance and excess of the libidinal economy beyond modern sexual classification; the wilful and defiant bodies of disobedient children, girls, and lesbians; Black aberrations in racist America; and the beautiful experiments of free living and the everyday anarchy of ordinary Black girls and women as wayward lives beyond the anti-black world of white policing, liberalism, and respectability.
The exhibition approaches corporeality as something that does not have to be fully visible or legible. On the contrary, it insists on the right to opacity. In this sense, the queer perspective emerges not merely as a question of identity, but as a poetic and political force that dismantles the norms and classifications of gender, sexuality, and bodily coherence, opening space for the wild force of the flesh, for multiplicity and unpredictability. For beautiful improvisations and performative experiments, for reconfigurations of the sensible, and for a refusal of governance.
To think with anarchic bodies means to accept being incomplete. Not a single being, but dispersed within fugitive choreographies and eroticism, within zigzag lines that slip away from the linearity of this exhibition setting.
Curator: Slavcho Dimitrov
Participating Artists: Darko Aleksovski, Gjorgji Despodov, Klelija Zhivkovikj, Hristina Ivanoska, Jovan Josifovski, Aleksandra Petrushevska and Tereza Lazarev, Yane Calovski
*The exhibition is part of the 13th edition of Skopje Pride Weekend 2026 – Festival for Queer Art, Culture and Theory
WALLPAPERS: Wallpapers and Artworks from the Museum of Contemporary Art Skopje and evn collection.
With the advent of Modernism, space is reduced to background, turning neutral, silent, almost invisible. The “White Cube” was the plain stage set for an art seeking to rid itself of ornament and décor. Contemporaneously, the 20th century saw the emergence of pavilion-style architectures with glass facades that let views unfold and interior and exterior flow into one another.
The museum in Skopje also shows such architectural characteristics of Modernism, as does the EVN Headquarters in Maria Enzersdorf near Vienna, Austria. For the stairwell of the Austrian building from the 1960s, an exceptional concept, launched in 2018, was developed: Artists were commissioned to create purpose-designed wallpapers for various walls, creating islands for exhibits of selected works from the evn collection. The collection, in existence since 1995 and curated by the collection’s Art Advisory Board, places its focus on international contemporary art.
For the 2026 exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Skopje, this setting is taken on the road for the first time ever and transplanted into a different environment. Mobile walls, featuring selected wallpapers and artworks from the evn collection, combined with works from the museum’s collection, are installed on the ground floor. They cut through not only the building’s cubic floor plan but also the modern notion of neutrality and objectivity. The folding screens present themselves in the space like sculptures and, at once, as carriers of images. They open up and close, reveal and conceal.
This creates transitions instead of boundaries, dialogue instead of demarcation. Different voices, colors, and textures, times, and ways of thinking encounter one another. The once austere clarity transforms into a labyrinth of impressions—multilayered, open, and in constant change.
Tapeti brings together works of art of different provenance. Themes, subjects, and artistic attitudes of several generations intersect and inform one another, making visible the universality of art and art production.
Curatorial team: Brigitte Huck, Heike Maier-Rieper, Markus Schinwald, Thomas D. Trummer, Blagoja Varosanec
Curatorial Assistance: Iva Dimovski, Martin Embacher, Nikola Martinovski
Exhibition Design Concept: Markus Schinwald
Production and realization: Martin Embacher, Lisi Zeininger
Visualisation of wallpaper designs: Christine Schmauszer
Organisation: Natalija Mejandjieva, Nikola Martinovski
MoCA Skopje Graphic design: Albana Bektesh
Assistance to the evn collection: Benjamin Kos
Setup and wall constructions: Monozero DOOEL Skopje
Print: IDEA Plus 360° Communications
Cover photo: In the foreground, a sculpture by Naso Bekjarovski, Winner, 1974, metal, from the collections of the MSU Skopje; in the background: Elizabeth Bakambamba Tambwe, The Day I Killed Elvis (Wallpaper), 2020, wallpaper, recurring pattern, digitally edited from a edited photo as a source; commissioned for the collections of EVN, 2020
Photography: Markus Krottendorfer
Views from the exhibition at: https://www.tapeti.at/en/exhibition-views/
Building Environments is a travelling exhibition of the Japan Foundation, and features 80 buildings, civil-engineering projects, and landscapes which cover all the 47 prefectures in Japan, which are introduced through photographs, texts and video images. It presents a rarely considered aspect of Japan, taking the built environment of the various regions of a country that is geographically diverse and often struck by natural disasters, with the aim of examining how Japanese people have engaged and struggled with the natural environment and how they have carried on and created locality.
Тhe presentation of the exhibition in North Macedonia is realized in collaboration of the Museum of Contemporary Art Skopje with the Japan Foundation and the Embassy of Japan.
Cover photography: Keihin Industrial Area. Photography by Ken Ohyama
The multi-sensory exhibition “Museum in a Suitcase” comprises tactile replicas of 11 carefully selected works from the Museum of Contemporary Art Skopje collection, realized within the framework of the project “MSU Masterpieces for Everyone” – an initiative dedicated to greater accessibility to contemporary art. The project was realized through a series of interconnected activities aimed at improving the Museum’s accessibility and inclusiveness for visitors with visual and hearing impairments. The implementation involved collaboration between museum staff, national and international experts, partner institutions, and target user groups, ensuring that museum inclusion is approached fully and sustainably.
The project includes the development of a MoCA Skopje Accessibility Study in collaboration with experts in the field of museum inclusion: Dr. Irena Ružin (North Macedonia) and M.A. Željka Sušić (Croatia), “Training of Museum Staff for Increased Museum Accessibility” at MSU-Skopje by Dr. Irena Ružin, M.A. Željka Sušić, M.A. Željka Bosnar-Salihagić from the Typhlological Museum, Zagreb (Croatia), and M.A. Jove Pargovski (North Macedonia). A “museum in a suitcase” was also developed, consisting of tactile replicas of works from the MoCA Skopje collection, NFL tags by M.A. Jove Pargovski, with audio descriptions in Braille and sign language videos for all works. 3 3D artworks inspired by the tactile images are also included.
Partners of the project are the State School for Children and Youth with Visual Impairment “Dimitar Vlahov” – Skopje and the Association of Persons with Physical Disabilities of Skopje “Mobility”.
The event was addressed by the curator Bojana Janeva, who, with her dedicated work in the field of inclusion, opened a new chapter in the activities of the Museum of Contemporary Art.
The project is supported by the Balkan Museum Network through the Hadley Fund for the Cultural Heritage of Southeast Europe, Great Britain, as well as by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism.
Photos by Filip Lafazanovski.
Featuring Austrian & Macedonian artists exploring the relationship between humans and nature in the
age of the Anthropocene.
The planetary climate crisis is manifesting itself in an alarming manner. Increasingly extreme weather events and their destructive forces are having a lasting effect on our romantic idea of an “unspoiled nature.” In response, the multimedia exhibition Touch Nature presents Austrian and Macedonian artists who take a stand on the effects of the Anthropocene. It becomes clear that artists not only document abuses and articulate forms of resistance, but also develop encouraging strategies for a fundamental change of perspective, offering hopeful visions for a new relationship between humans and nature grounded in mindfulness environmental respect. The notion that humankind exists outside of nature and has dominion over it has proven to be a phantasm. Humans cannot be understood as independent of their environment, but only in their multifaceted relationship with other beings. Artists approach this understanding with traditional media like painting, drawing, photography, video, and sculpture, but also develop new forms such as bio art, which incorporates the intentional participation of non-
human organisms as active agents within the artistic production. They are likewise departing from traditional exhibition venues, intertwining their practice with environmental movements and creating eco-art projects that combines ecological and eco-feminist activism with modes of artistic inquiry.
Artistic projects are developed in interdisciplinary collaboration with scientists from a wide range of disciplines who address issues such as economic exploitation of land, increasing soil sealing, the global impact of current consumer behaviour and the spread of epidemics but also to explore living organisms and genetics. The Touch Nature exhibition series, which has so far been shown in 13 in Austrian Culture Forums in cooperations with galleries and museums in Europe and the USA, follows the insights of Alexander von Humboldt, pioneer of ecological thinking and founder of climatology, ecology, and oceanography, who famously wrote to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in 1810: “Nature must be felt.”
Curator: Sabine Fellner
Curatorial Assistant: Laurenz Fellner
Artist exhibiting:
Judith Wagner, Nada Prlja, Petre Nikoloski, Irena Paskali, Michael Endlicher, Donya Aalipour, Elena Kristofor, Annika Eschmann, Maren Jeleff – Klaus Pichler, Monica L. Locascio, Alfred Hruschka, Prinzpod, Elizabeth von Samsonow, Nives Widauer, Edgar Honetschläger, Monika Pichler, Marielis Seyler, Aneta Svetieva
The exhibition All That We Have in Common: An Institution That Breathes introduces the theoretical and political foundations of “combat breathing” as a critical method for acting and reading air as a political medium within the institutional sphere.
Breathing the same air does not mean that we breathe equally. The lack of breath usually follows the lives of the marginalized. Frantz Fanon describes the dreams of the colonized body as “muscular dreams: dreams of action, dreams of aggressive vitality, of combat breathing.” In these dreams of freedom, the lungs are both instrument and muscle, sometimes atrophied by the toxicity of colonial atmospheres, but always ready to take a sudden breath in decolonial efforts.
In a time when systematic abuse suffocates the disenfranchised and catastrophic governmental or corporate practices take away the breath of the underprivileged, the challenge is to breathe deeply and fully. We inhale when it is hard and exhale when we are freed from a heavy burden, with the intention of showing the world what happens when people are excluded, deprived of rights, and oppressed.
Inspired by the notion of “combat breathing” and the widespread metaphor of being out of breath associated with oppression, the exhibition All That We Have in Common (An Institution That Breathes) shows how artistic practices intervene, visualize, and dismantle the atmospheres of colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism within institutional and everyday life.
Forensic Architecture documents the “toxic clouds” of military and industrial operations that turn the atmosphere into a weapon; in Jumana Manna’s work, air becomes an extension of the territory, colonized and surveilled; Denise Ferreira da Silva and Arjuna Neuman explore the history of colonial extraction and the invisible air as trauma that travels through spaces and bodies; the project Gaza Remains the Story by the Palestinian Museum testifies to the constant suffocation of a territory, politically, physically, and symbolically; Durmish Kjazim’s work reveals the stifled air within exhibitions and archives of institutions where Roma bodies and works remain invisible; Zorica Zafirovska, through her intervention addressing the polluted air in Skopje, opens the local horizon on this theme: breathing as an everyday political act in a city living under constant toxic threat.
All these contexts are interconnected and stem from the same structures of violence: capitalist extraction, colonial hierarchies, and systemic exclusion. The project aims to uncover the violence we pretend not to see, in our environment and cultural spaces, and its material, social, and political configurations. Thus, the most important question is how we can learn to detect the whispers of marginalized apneic bodies and, through artistic practices, think about how to enable them to breathe again.
Artists: Forensic Architecture, Denise Ferreira da Silva and Arjuna Neuman, Durmiš Kjazim, Jumana Manna, Zorica Zafirovska, The Palestinian Museum
Curators: Mira Gakjina and Jovanka Popova
Free download of the catalog: All That We Have in Common: Institution That Breaths
The exhibition is financially supported by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of the Republic of North Macedonia and Tikveš.
Cover illustration: Forensic Architecture, Cloud Studies, 2020, video, 32’59”
15th BYA is a two-year-long, process-based Biennial, convened by the artist and curator Nada Prlja and curator and educator Sebastian Cichocki. The Biennale will open on November 18, 2025 (at MoCA – Skopje) and on November 28, 2025 (at the Museum of Macedonia and ES J.H. Pestalozzi), unfolding through a sequence of four chapters that reflect the changing seasons.
Chapter 1.
Tomorrow Began Yesterday
Curated by Nada Prlja in collaboration with Sebastian Cichocki
Chapter 1.1
Exhibition duration> 18.11.2025 – 28.11.2025
Location> Museum of Contemporary Art – Skopje
Opening> 18.11.2025 at 19:00 with performances by Sergej Kalenikov, Julija Кasteluči and Kristina Tanevska
Exhibition duration> 18.11.2025 – 28.11.2025
Participants> Džemiliana Abdulova (Skopje), Betül Aksu (Izmir/London), Renea Begolli (Prishtina), Angela Boshevska (Bitola/Skopje), Natalija Gucheva (Skopje/Ghent), Sergej Kalenikov (Skopje), Julija Кasteluči (Belgrade/Milan), Gabriela Kiczor-Bentkowska (Warsaw), Ana Lazarevska (Skopje), Izabela Levenska Miljanikj (Skopje), Milcho Manchevski & 1AM Group (Skopje) [revisiting the first BYA from 1987], Jana Nikolovska (Skopje), Maryna Sakowska (Poznań), Dushan Stefanovski (Skopje), Kristina Tanevska (Skopje) and Dragana Zarevska (Kratovo/Praha) and Gjorgji Despodov (Prilep/Hague).
This exhibition delves into the ways emotions and intimacy are experienced and expressed through the visual and social aesthetics of contemporary life. It examines how emerging codes within youth culture shape our understanding of human connections and self-expression today. Through works that draw inspiration from childhood or coming-of-age experiences, using music, gaming, anime and other forms of post-digital visual languages, the artists question how contemporary generations construct and perform feelings within the realm of everydayness. The exhibition brings together a variety of voices that challenge stereotypes and introduce a new image of reality. A reality that already began yesterday.
The exhibition at MoCA – Skopje (chapter 1.1) is organised primarily around works by female artists, addressing topics characteristic of women’s experiences: the precarious and subordinate position of women in patriarchal societies, as reflected in Maryna Sakowska’s work, or the resistance to Grind Culture* depicted in the installation by Zarevska and Despodov, to the coming-of-age experience in communities overlooked by “others,” as in the work by Dzemiliana Abdulova. Despite an evident affinity with the more classical artistic techniques, such as painting and drawing, the works nevertheless resist normativity and conventional structures, instead embracing emotional instability and uncertainty as inherent conditions of our temporality.
As Natalija Gucheva, one of the participating artists, writes when describing her performative work: “Set to challenge traditional societal norms, the work provides an alternative rooted in world-building and speculation, ultimately creating new ground for collective reflection.” This exhibition does exactly that.
Chapter 1.2
Location> Museum of Macedonia
Opening> 28.11.2025 at 19:00 with performances by Krsto Gligorjadis and Sergej Kalenikov and collaborative project by Marija Trpeska and Stefan Anchevski
Exhibition duration> 28.11.2025 – 12.12.2025
Participants> Kreshnik Arifi (Pristina), Gjorgji Despodov (Prilep/Hague), Esteban Devignaud (Saint-Etienne/Paris), Mila Gavrilovska (Skopje), Krsto Gligorjadis (Skopje), Ana Likar (Ljubljana/Frankfurt am Main), Milcho Manchevski & 1AM Group (Skopje) [revisiting the first BYA from 1987], Marija Trpeska (Skopje) and Stefan Anchevski (Kumanovo), Margo Sarkisova (Pokrovsk/Graz) and Maryna Sakowska (Poznań)
Chapter 1.2 of the 15th BMU, organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art – Skopje, is set in the Historical Department of the Museum of Macedonia. The foundation of this part of the biennial arises from the relationship with time, with the past and with history. In each selected artwork, the historical place becomes a subject – which demands to be revisited, to be looked at anew or to be listened to again, while at the same time opening it up for a dialogue with the present or the future. Through this “reanimation” of historical sites, objects and narratives, the exhibition positions the Museum not as an archival space of fixed meanings, but as a space where time shifts, overlaps and expands.
The works of the artists in the exhibition arise from an awareness of the pressures and fissures that shape contemporary life: economic uncertainty, weakened social relations, historical amnesia and the erosion of cultural and material heritage. Artists are once again questioning established meanings and value systems, understanding historical heritage as an evolving terrain. At the same time, they acknowledge that in the absence of a time machine, history cannot be corrected or erased, but they still seek symbolic resources that allow us to move on, because tomorrow has already begun yesterday.
Chapter 1.3
Location> Elementary School J.H. Pestalozzi
The exhibition is for the pupils only and is not open to the public
Exhibition duration> 28.11.2025 – 12.12.2025
Participants> Renea Begolli (Prishtina), Elena Dimoska Nikoloska (Prilep), Nikola Efremov (Skopje), Sare Qerimi (Skopje) and Margo Sarkisova (Pokrovsk/Graz).
Chapter 1.4
Longer term individual projects on different platforms and in various public locations.
Duration> 28.11.2025 – 28.11.2026
Participants> Collective ‘Bostanie’ (community garden), Mila Gavrilovska (photo archive), Izabela Levenska Miljanikj (public and online archive) all from Skopje and DNLM (public art) from Ljubljana.
Chapter 2.
Lessons in Miseducation
Convened by Sebastian Cichocki in collaboration with Nada Prlja
April 2026
. . .
Visual identity: Esteban Devignaud
Photographs: Mila Gavrilovska
Both 15th Biennale of Young Artists participants
The project is realized by the Museum of Contemporary Art – Skopje, with the support of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. Friends of MoCA – Skopje: Austrian Embassy – Skopje and Tikveš, Kavadarci.
