Natasha Nedelkova: Performing the Impersonal / Manifesting the Speculum

Natasha Nedelkova is one of the three award-winning artists for “Most Successful Artist and Work of Art” at last year’s 13th International Biennial of Young Artists, and the award implies the realization of an independent project at the Museum of Contemporary Art – Skopje. At the same time, Nedelkova has been selected by the European Nomad Biennale for Contemporary Art – Manifesta 14 to be part of their official program this year.

“Performing the Impersonal / Manifesting the Speculum” is Nedelkova’s project which is realized in the form of two video installations “The Act of Seeing” and “Manifesting Speculum” in two separate spaces in MSU-Skopje. In those two “black boxes” on 3 projections and 4 screens, reflections on female sexuality, political engagement, violence, and storytelling will be presented.

Nedelkova, relying on concepts from Sigmund Freud and Lis Irigaray, questions the possibility of using the techniques of manifestation in order to visualize female sexuality, which is considered mysterious, inaccessible, a “black continent”.

With this thematic focus and in a specific way, this is an attempt to make an additional contribution to the illumination of this phenomenon.

“Through these installations we perform the impersonal through collective listening, dancing social choreographies and visualizing positions of protest. Female sexuality, viewed from the perspective of the Manifested Speculum, produces an ethical knowledge that is poetic, opaque, and against social order and law. She is against dangerous reproductions of the same. It weaves togetherness with the unknown that is coming, through free play,” says Nedelkova.

Vladimir Janchevski, one of the curators of the exhibition, believes that Nedelkova’s works from this exhibition are a creative continuation of her research interests, which are elaborated in some previous works, as well as in the award-winning video work “Tissues of Identity” presented on the 13th. Biennale in 2021.

“In a delicately woven network of videos connected in two video installations, Nedelkova builds a complex structure in a simple way, which tries to question the border between the visible and the hidden. Referring to significant aspects of the (im)personal at the intersection between the political and the poetic, she reveals the subtle relations of the possibilities to visualize something and manifest it as a point of resistance,” says Janchevski.

In addition to Nedelkova, awarded authors from the 13th International Biennale of Young Artists are Darko Alexovski, whose exhibition was opened on April 8 and can still be seen at MSU – Skopje, and in November, Driton Selmani will present himself with an independent exhibition. The award of the Biennale implies the realization of an independent project, and thus the Museum of Contemporary Art – Skopje, as a responsible institution, realizes its strategic determination to stimulate the recent art scene and open opportunities for a worthy presentation of new generations of artists to the general public.

The exhibition is realized with the support of the Ministry of Culture of RS. Macedonia and EVN AD Skopje