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.
International group exhibition of works from the collections of MG+MSUM, Ljubljana and MoCA-Skopje
The artistic practices originating not in the center of the Western art system, but on its margins—geographical, political, and symbolic—can offer an epistemic and aesthetic framework through which to reexamine the urgencies of our current moment. When these margins are not seen as spaces of inferiority, they can offer a distinctly Eastern European perspective shaped by the experience of socialism, collective utopias, transition, conflict and war, and the collapse of ideological systems in the 1990s. The prevalent artistic topics of the body, irony, ideology, evidence, and utopia respond to these historical experiences, while also engaging with the complexities of the present.
This exhibition, entitled The East Remains Possible, comprising a selection of works from Moderna galerija’s Arteast 2000+ and national collections from Ljubljana, in dialogue with the Solidarity Collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Skopje, is precisely about the ever-evolving, omnipresent potentiality and vision for transformation and regeneration—and the constant pull back towards the tragedy of everyday life. It inclines towards the former, believing that there is still space for radically imagining the present. In this light, the exhibition frames artistic production not as passive reflection, but as a generative tool for engaging with the dialectic of disillusionment and possibility. Artistic strategies drawn from the region offer mechanisms for resistance, collective memory, and speculative imagination—tools essential for navigating the dissolution of political and social imaginaries in an era increasingly defined by precarity.
As early as the 1920s, the Group of Constructivists from Trieste envisioned artistic action as a form of aesthetic and sociopolitical revolution within the context of the historical avant-gardes, especially Russian Constructivism. For this reason, it is regarded as an authentic forerunner of the postwar neo-avant-garde tendencies in the region.
Among other things, our exhibition calls attention to what remains of the idea of Eastern Europe today, and whether we can still speak of “East European art.” After the initial enthusiasm about the victory of liberalism over communism following the end of the Cold War in 1989, it became apparent that the ideal of liberal democracy, which the East had so enthusiastically embraced, had dissipated. In recent years, we have witnessed growing tensions in the region: the rise of new autocratic regimes, ongoing refugee crises, persistent nationalist tendencies in the Balkans, war in Ukraine, the unresolved “Palestinian question,” and genocide in Gaza.
In this context, the question arises: Did the future look better yesterday than it does today? How can we draw on historical experiences, artistic strategies, and alternative forms of knowledge rooted in East European contexts? The artworks in the exhibition may provide some answers, serving as tools for understanding the present—without, seemingly, a clear future—and for finding a path toward different, more inclusive possibilities and a fairer, more solidary world.
The exhibition The East Remains Possible unfolds in two interrelated segments, each of which retells a separate story.
The segment titled Show Me Your Wounds (Regeneration) encompasses the stories of The Body as a Space for Resistance, Ideologies and Subversions, and Irony and Absurdity as Strategies of Critical Distance. This section examines the body, language, and iconography as sites through which artists have performed, resisted, and subverted ideological and affective regimes.
The other segment, titled New Reality as an Artefact of Transformation, retells the stories of Documenting Reality and Utopia as a Space of Social Alternatives. It examines documentation, memory, and utopian speculation as methods of artistic engagement with both historical and possible futures.
In a time increasingly marked by the erosion of democratic forms, ecological catastrophe, and historical amnesia, the works presented here offer practices of remembering, resisting, and imagining—gestures that may help us think the world otherwise.
The Arteast 2000+ collection is the first museum collection focused on East European postwar avant-garde artistic practices within a broader international context. Since its inception in 2000, it has provided in-depth insight into the artistic production of the region, bringing to light the social and political challenges faced by artists in former socialist countries. The collection emerged within its own “space of utterance,” both in terms of the geopolitical territory of Eastern Europe and as a conceptual space shaped by power, identity, and discourse. From the very beginning, the collection has encouraged reflection on the processes of historicization: Who writes art history, for whom, and with what intention? At the same time, it creates the conditions for a critical redefinition of the existing artistic canon, opening space for diverse and often overlooked narratives.
The Solidarity Collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art Skopje originated as a global response to a disaster—the earthquake that devastated the city in 1963. Responding to a call for artistic solidarity, artists from around the globe contributed their works, co-creating a collection based on international exchange, responsibility, and dialogue.
Artists: Marina Abramović | Maja Bajević | Joseph Beuys | Geta Brătescu | Violeta Chapovska | Chto Delat | Venko Cvetkov | Braco Dimitrijević | Vlasta Delimar | Orsolya Drozdik | Stano Filko | Alla Georgieva | Tomislav Gotovac | Ion Grigorescu | Group of Constructivists from Trieste (Avgust Černigoj, Eduard Stepančič, Giorgio Carmelich) | Hristina Ivanoska | Gjorgje Jovanovik | Alexander Kosolapov | Ivan Kožarić | Katarzyna Kozyra | Andreja Kulunčić | Vladimir Kuprijanov | Laibach | Kazimir Malevich | Goranka Matić | Alex Mlynárčik | Petre Nikoloski | Ahmet Ogut | OHO | OPA | Irena Paskali | Dushan Percinkov | Géza Pernecky | Marko Pogacnik | Dmitry Prigov | Niho Pushija | Josef Robakowski | Driton Selmani | Nedko Solakov | Mladen Stilinović | Nebojša Šerić-Šoba | Raša Todosijević | Igor Toshevski | Endre Tót | Goran Trbuljak | Simon Uzunovski.
Curators: Bojana Piškur, Martina Vovk (MG+MSUM, Ljubljana); Ivana Vaseva, Blagoja Varоshanec, Iva Dimovski and Vladimir Janchevski (MoCA-Skopje).
Exhibition design: Jovan Ivanovski
Visual design: Iliana Petrushevska
The exhibition is a continuation of the collaboration between MoCA – Skopje and MG+MSUM, Ljubljana that began with the joint exhibition Weaving Worlds: Collections in Conversation, that opened in February 2025 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova.
This joint exhibition of the two collections underscores the collaborative efforts between the museums, which are anticipated to expand through further partnerships.
The exhibition is realized by the MoCA – Skopje, in collaboration with MG+MSUM, Ljubljana, with financial support from the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of the Republic of North Macedonia, as a project of national significance for 2025.
Friends of MoCA – Skopje: Tikveš and Eurolink Insurance.
Within the broader framework of the ubiquitous and important philosophy of the already pressing need for symbiosis between nature and man, interdependence, complementarity, cooperation and participation of the multitude of species in a society on the brink of extinction (Anna Tsing, Donna Haraway, Murray Bookchin), the idea of the importance of abandoned spaces as opposed to cultivated spaces, as spaces of regeneration that in some way exemplify the indestructible rebellious energy of nature, has been discovered. According to the theories of the third landscape or fourth nature, it is precisely these disturbed lands that, if not neglected as remnants or weeds, are new ecosystems that open up space to reconsider the preservation of nature and natural diversity, but also offer examples of different principles of organization based on principles of mutual aid, solidarity and cooperation, as drivers of evolution. The third landscape, according to the concept of the renowned landscape architect and gardener Gilles Clément, is the space that is usually treated as neglected – the undecided spaces, devoid of function and difficult to name.
This is precisely the focus of the latest phase of Oliver Musovik’s (1971) developing artistic line, one of the most active artists from the country, who has been present on the local scene since the late 1990s, and has been actively presenting himself on the world art scene since. In the last two years, he has been developing several photographic series that process the spaces of the “third landscape” inhabited by ruderal ecologies, that is, plants that grow on ruins (the etymology is from the Latin word rudus, ruins). These plants challenge conventional notions of botanical beauty and merit, and according to the artist, are unsung heroes of survival, inspiring respect with their adaptability, while often dismissed as “weeds”.
Musovik discovers his passion for research in these plants, and through his artistic engagement, he provides them the opportunity to shine, to receive recognition for their work, as a kind of celebration of the resilience of life on the fringes and the captivating allure of the “third landscape.” That is, these self-organized communities, devoid of human interference, not only exemplify the power of nature but also the unexpected moments of chance for different communities to form. But Musovik also notes encouragement from the philosophies of social ecology of the American social theorist and political philosopher Murray Bookchin, which is, in fact, a call for social reconstruction along ecological lines, which broadly implies that environmental challenges stem from profound societal issues or the dominance over the natural world.
In this direction, the exhibition “Plant Adaptations” is being formed, which includes the series “Overgrown” from 2023, “Ruderal Herbarium” from 2023-2025, “Ruderal Herbarium of Singapore” from 2024, “Microclimates” from 2024 and “AItlas of Singaporean Ferns” from 2025, as well as one series of two, and one single photograph. It is a research endeavor manifested in several groups of photographs, some of them accompanied by text, in which the artist records natural phenomena, most often in the form of contemporary botanical catalogs, as well as a digital publication, fully illustrated and co-authored with advanced AI language models, which is placed on a computer for free viewing. These are works that were created when the artist was in artist residencies in Austria, Singapore, Germany, and France, and which have already been presented to the audience there (at the kunstraumarcade in Mödling, Austria and at the Singapore Art Museum, Singapore), and which are being presented in the country for the first time.
These series presented within the framework of the exhibition “Plant Adaptations” complete a research oeuvre of the author, who has observed different plant species and adaptations in different climates around the world.
With “Plant Adaptations”, the artist Oliver Musovik marks 30 years of professional artistic activity, that is, 30 years since his first solo exhibition at the Art Gallery, Bitola, in 1995. This exhibition takes place 18 years after his last solo exhibition, “The Artist” at the Museum of Contemporary Art – Skopje, in 2007.
Excerpt from the text by the curator Ivana Vaseva about the exhibition
Oliver Musovik (1971, Skopje) is a visual artist working across multiple media, mostly photography and visual storytelling.
His practice explores the intersection of nature, urban space, and social dynamics, with particular focus on adaptation and resilience in transitional environments. His work foregrounds the landscape as a socio-ecological construct shaped by humans and nonhumans, contributing to dialogues on ecological resilience, sustainability, and the role of art in fostering critical awareness.
His work has been presented internationally, including at SAM – Singapore Art Museum (2025), the Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb (2023), the Museum of Contemporary Art Skopje, +MSUM Metelkova Ljubljana (2021, 2018), MACRO – Museum of Contemporary Art, Rome (20024), Camera Austria, Kunsthaus Graz (2004), the Fridericianum Kassel (2003), Manifesta 4 (Frankfurt, 2002), and the Istanbul Biennial (1999).
Musovik’s works are held in public collections such as n.b.k. Berlin, the Museum of Contemporary Art Skopje, Fondazione Fotografia Modena, and +MSUM Ljubljana.
His works have been published in art publications, including “Autobiography” (Thames and Hudson, 2004), “Vitamin Ph – New Perspectives in Photography” (Phaidon, 2006), and “Photo Art: Photography in the 21st Century” (Dumont 2007 / Aperture, 2008).
He has also participated in residency programs across Europe, Asia, and the United States.
The exhibition is financially supported by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of the Republic of North Macedonia. MoCA – Skopje friend: Tikveš.
