Desire Might Be, Could Be, As It Always Is, Close To Love

ARCHIVAL ASSEMBLY AND INTERVENTION BY KUMJANA NOVAKOVA

This is an attempt to evoke the possibility that each museum collection might be, could be, as eventually it is – endless. As each absence and omission in a collection is nothing less than a presence.

Through the gathering of the archival, the (non)visible elements of this collection of ours and the possible and impossible experiences and relationships, it becomes a gathering of our many possible pasts. Past, or to be more accurate, pastness that could be. 
Pastness that our living present(s) might need and hope for.

Envisioned as notes on unseen collection of desires, in the form of an artistic research into the possible, this is only one of the many thinkable archival and documentary interventions into the MoCA-Skopje’s visible and invisible collection. 

Through a speculative take on the history of the Museum’s collection, initially responding to American and USA based presences, and the potential relationships between the art spaces of USA and first Yugoslavia, then North Macedonia, so to critically look at the spaces of making and open possibilities for the multiple pasts to be treated as open-ended (non)regimes.

The exhibition gathers archives, works and thoughts of Sarai Sherman, Jasper Johns, Ann Chernow, Burt Chernow, Christo Javašev, Metka Krašovec, Tadeusz Mislowski, Luis Camnitzer, Jeff Russell, Petar Hadži Boškov, Robert Jankuloski, Dunja Ivanišević, Janaki and Milton Manaki, Blagoja Drnkov, Roland Baladi, Diana Thompson, Kumjana Novakova.

We are grateful for the knowledge and work of all known and unknown artists, writers, scholars, activists and all other cultural and art workers without whom it would be impossible to research and activate all the multiplicities we come from and learn from.

Exhibition Team

Author of concept and intervention: Kumjana Novakova

Associate, Curator of Museum Collection: Iva Dimovska

Visual identity and design: Elena Dinovska Zarapčiev

Adaptation of graphic design: Iliana Petrusevska

Technical support for exhibition design: Albana Bekteshi

Translation and proofreading: Andrijana Papić Manceva

Technical realisation: Jordan Arsovski

With the collaborative support of the State Archives of the Republic of North Macedonia, Cinematheque of the Republic of North Macedonia, National Academy of Design, USA.

The exhibition is a collaboration between the Museum of Contemporary Art – Skopje, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of the Republic of North Macedonia, and the Embassy of the United States of America in the Republic of North Macedonia.