Yane Calovski

Women beyond the Verge

 

The curatorial selection entitled Women beyond the Verge includes the portfolios of Jeanne van Heeswijk (Rotterdam), Barbara Holub (Vienna), Hristina Ivanoska (Skopje), Daniela Paes Leão (Amsterdam), Despina Papadopoulos (New York) and Inga Zimprich (Berlin/Kiev). It is a selection made for the research archive initiated and developed by 1:1projects in Rome, a network of independent art producers that develops diverse and innovative projects, fostering participation, interaction and collaborative practices. In addition to being a personal selection by a guest curator for the archive, this invitation is also a way to materialize a new collaboration between the two organizations, 1:1projects and press to exit project space, and to continue the dialogue initiated during Daniele Balit’s curatorial residency in Skopje in October 2007.

I have selected six distinctly different artistic practices, but which have two important aspects in common: a) communication - by being deeply rotted in research-based tradition; and b) collaboration - by entrusting the idea of a collective approach to authorship and context-based productions.

The act of assuming something as a given, finished and explained, never enters the realm of these artists. Instead, they are looking at functional intervals or gaps that have dented the relationship between institutional and urban space (Holub), the space of community action and local politics (van Heeswijk), the space of identification of technological performance (Papadopoulos), the space where factual and fictional stories collide (Paes Leão), the space of reading history through the prism of contemporary civil actions (Ivanoska), and, last but not least, the space of negotiation between systems of knowledge and its distribution (Zimprich).

All the artists challenge existing norms, ask questions, and define their positions along the way. They do not ask permission but, rather, pursue their ideas and seek to include in the dialogue the peripheral and marginalized. There is an attitude they all share that is disturbingly infectious, attracting you so that you believe them and you want to know what they know. By considering these six individual positions, we have the opportunity to reflect on our own work within the context of the larger artistic and social dimensions in which we partake, hopefully not as passive by-standers, but as active and critical voices.

There is nothing naïve when Despina Papadolusos asks us to wear “light” (in the case of “Moi”), or to wear a sweater that measures the atmospheric temperature against our own pulse (“The Temperature Sweater”). As an inventor, she transforms her design into a social device. Having made the city of New York her home and work base, she is continually concerned with and provoked by inspiration and perseverance. She graduated from NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program in 1994, after having received an M.A. in Philosophy from the University of Leuven, Belgium, and wrote her thesis on “The Sublime and Limit Experiences”. Since then she has created a personal design language that helps her destabilize our collective experience of the performance and behavior of everyday objects. She shakes up our ideas of what is acceptable and what is standard, and guides us through the new generation of wearable technologies. While we marvel at her designs, we are actually seduced by the intelligence and humor by the ways she uses and appropriates vernacular and scientific knowledge.

More than any artist I know, Jeanne van Heeswijk goes against all preconceived notions of what is possible in the dialogue between the individual and social, cultural and political systems. In her collaborations she conceptualizes the knowledge of many collaborators, creating pathways for ideas that, on closer scrutiny, we realize are tangible, real. A great example is “The Blue House”, a refuge for the mind on the newly built island of Ijburg in Amsterdam, which perfectly embodies the ideas of renewal, participation and cultural production. Through her works van Heeswijk inspires and teaches us without ever falling into a dogmatic mode. She is a visionary who juggles the sense of civic responsibility with the idealism of an artist. She is an artist who has actually figured out how to penetrate that space where political activism meets highest artistic merit.

Portuguese artist Daniela Paes Leão combines diverse media such as film, photography, publications and web design with sociology, economy, and other disciplines in order to create projects that are at once visual and contextual. She currently lives and works in Amsterdam, but frequently travels outside of her safety zone to locate context for new productions, as seen in her latest video of her research on identity politics, “The Notebook of Diplomacy”, made in Macedonia in February 2008. She applies a transient form of narrative that usually takes her from one perspective to another in a continuous journey through the experiences and perceptions of people from many cultures. In her works the process of questioning is of primary importance, where the possibility of not arriving at any final conclusion has greater value. However, questions about our cultural differences and the world we live in as a whole, rather than fragmented, entity become the guiding principles in decoding her artistic practice.

Barbara Holub’s work addresses anthropological issues that decisively shape society. She investigates both the changes in society and the role of the individual within it, examining the ever-increasing divide of the public and private sectors through her practice as an artist and architect. Questioning the new neo-liberal society, Holub returns to the aesthetics of the late 1960s and the effects of the utopian dreams of urban design and material culture that symbolized ‘the dream of the future’. Her installations employ photography, video, drawing and other media as she explores various patterns of communication between the individual and the system, often involving people from outside the art context to participate as „actors“. Together with architect Paul Rajakovics, in 1999 she created the architecture and urbanism company “transparadiso” whose work reflects global issues alongside development and new tools for ‘direct urbanism’.
 
Hristina Ivanoska builds upon her artistic practice by finding ways for individual action against the established roles and norms defined by conventional social and political systems. Ivanoska’s recent work, “On Freedom and the Streets of Belgrade” (2007), is a feuilleton consisting of 13 texts published in the Serbian daily newspaper Politika in February and March of 2007. The study focuses on street denominations, which are more of a political than public decision and reflect our times and the world we live in. Behind each name, however, there are the more intimate stories of women who left a mark on their own day and age. In a similar context, her latest video installation, “Naming of the Bridge: Rosa Plaveva and Nakie Bajram”, deals with civic engagement and public discourse. Dr. Suzan Milevska has stated that this work “is a rare example of an individual initiative that looks at the issue of the veil with a sensitivity unburdened by the conflicts of the past; an attempt to build a bridge between the different stances towards the veil in conflicting intellectual and cultural camps”.

Inga Zimprich works as an artist and curator and divides her time between Berlin and Kiev, Ukraine. Her collaborative projects revolve around the negotiation of the conditions under which we - as the public - cooperate, create and distribute knowledge. While studying at the Jan van Eyck Academie she developed the “Faculty of Invisibility” as one of the “group of tutors” conducting individual and often ephemeral practices within such departments such: Speech, Communiqué, Letters, and others, traversing different formats of public presence. Since 2006 Zimprich works as a freelance curator for the Center of Contemporary Art – CCCK, Kiev (in collaboration with Ingela Johansson) and conducts an investigation into funding schemes established by the Soros Foundation during the 1990s and the need for the re-positioning of the local scene now that this funding is gone. In her most recent work, “Ordnungen der Liebe – What went wrong with Manifesta 6”, (again in collaboration with Ingela Johansson) she attempts, with the help of a professional physiologist therapeutic method, to reveal hidden emotions and conflicts and to arrive at new solutions after the failure to materialize a large scale project.