Closing Events for Bitter Sugar

On the last day before the closing of the multimedia project “Bitter Sugar” by the Macedonian artist Gjorgje Jovanovik, author Nikola Gelevski, and the curator Vladimir Janchevski will promote the publication following this project, and will have a public talk wit the artist. The event will start at 8 pm.  

The talk will touch upon themes of the specific working process and the project’s conceptualization, as well as the numerous references and rich iconography, the role of art and its relevance in Jovanovik’s entire artistic practice.

Beginning at 9 pm the promotion will be followed by the musical performance “Expelled from Paradise” by Dzijan Emin and Georgi Shareski, who will perform in the exhibition space.

Gjorge Jovanovik’s project Bitter Sugar was opened on September 19, 2023. (msu.mk/exhibitions) Curators of the project are Vladimir Janchevski and Blagoja Varoshanec.

With this project, Jovanovik integrates his entire creative practice, which includes the most diverse media and forms of expression, from drawing and installation to performance. The project represents this synthesis and builds upon the experiences of the historical avant-garde, especially the Dadaist and Surrealist interventions, in an attempt to transform and utilize them in the contemporary context, burdened with the challenges of (post)pandemic political and technological reality. The interweaving of the real and the surreal and the extreme meeting points is also reflected through the fusion of various genres. In the spatial installation comprised of a large number of painted pictures and objects and the animations that activate it, Jovanovik tries to create a multidimensional narrative network through which the numerous protagonists and the different situations they find themselves in are transformed to another level, as a sum total of our chaotic contemporaneity.

Gjorgje Jovanovik (born in Skopje in 1980) has realized multiple projects that focus on the issues of integration and disintegration of contemporary man. He re-examine interpersonal communication in the context of the general situation of redefining universal values, man-society relations, and consumerism as a key factor of modern life style, politics as a factor of disintegration of the cities, states, and families. Using no limits in media he has worked on installations, performances, objects, videos, collages, and paintings in order to achieve a transformation of the artistic dimensions of his individual expression by following up the fluidity of the contemporary context.

Some of his solo exhibitions in the past include: “Decapitated” – Prima Center Berlin (Berlin, 2020), “Chocolate Drops” – Hoast Gallery (Vienna, 2018), “Radio Free Skopje” – Center for Contemporary Arts (Skopje, 2015-16), “Inventions for you, wonderful people!” – Museum of Contemporary Art (Skopje, 2014), “Confessions of a cake eater” (Rovinj, 2013), “The fragmentary archive of the artist from the country in transition” (New York, 2010), “It’s Complicated” (Graz, 2010) etc. He also participated in art residencies such as IAAB – Basel, TICA – Tirana, La Cité internationale des Arts – Paris, Watermill Center – New York, “Apartment Project” – Istanbul, ISCP – New York, CCN – Graz.