Opening of the 8th edition of the Skopje Pride Weekend
Group Exhibtion BROKENNESS
Dear Friends,
Respected Media Representatives,
It is our greatest pleasure and honor to invite you to the opening of the group exhibition BROKENNESS, on September 2 at 20:30h, in the Museum of Contemporary Arts. With BROKENNESS we are also officially opening the eight edition of the Skopje Pride Weekend Festival 2020.
The group exhibition includes works by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, Karin Michalski, Hristina Ivanoska, Velimir Zernovski, and Hermes Pittakos and Federica Dauri. The exhibition is curated by Slavcho Dimitrov.
Against the backdrop of the increasing threat of neoliberal as well as nationalist, heteronormative and masculinist/Phallocentric ideals of unity, purity, completeness, sameness, success, and perfection, the exhibition BROKENNESS offer a queer perspective that instead begins with the idea that we are all broken in fundamental and specific ways, and that this brokenness offers the possibility for alternative political horizons. Henceforth, with the exhibition we want to explore the concept of brokenness as a critical position within the wider festival’s curatorial subject of cruel optimism, from four major perspectives: 1) Brokenness as constitutive socio-political ontology of the embodied subject, 2) Brokenness as reflecting the unequal distribution of the experience and social conditioning of being broken by various apparatuses of inequality, exploitation and oppression, 3) Brokenness as the various forms of semi-sovereign and collective acts and practices of breaking with the investments and relations of attachment marked as cruel optimism, and 4) Brokenness as a concept that fosters new inventories for thinking and practices of enacting community and the political.
We are setting Felix Gonzalez - Torres’s work as conceptual background of the exhibition not only in order to pay tribute to the immense importance and influence of his work in contemporary arts, but also because it sets the concept of brokenness, as developed above, as one of the major problems and axes of aesthetic and political creation and critique. Felix Gonzalez-Torres is an artist whose work has written and displaced the world history of arts in the 80ies and 90ies of the previous century, an artist to be exhibited for the first time in the Balkans. The other works and artists constituting the flesh of the exhibition open a dialogue with Gonzalez-Torres’ work or examine the concept of vulnerability, exposure, backward feelings, precarity, brokenness and cruel optimism in complex and various ways, as well as open desiring horizons and new forms of experience, thinking, interpreting and embodying subjectivity, the world, nature, the environment, sexuality, power, violence and freedom precisely through the experience of brokenness, beyond the exhausting attachments and cruel optimism.
The Skopje Pride Weekend is a festival for queer arts, culture and theory and its goal is to create spaces for presentation and promotion of nonnormative forms of worldmaking, that is to say relations, affects, identity positions, bodily styles and sensibilities that have been marked, by the heteronormative, nationalistic and neoliberal capitalist context, as queer, eccentric, and failures. The main curatorial subject of the 2020 edition of the festival is Cruel Optimism, by the means of which we want to pay respect to the Lauren Berlant's concept/work on cruel optimism (2011), and to investigate and problematise our contemporary social, cultural and political predicaments by setting this concept at work as critical tool.
You can hereby find the exhibition catalogue in English, as well as the catalogue for the entire festival programme. We would also like to inform you that it is only tonight, on the exhibition opening, that the audience will have the opportunity to follow the durational performance “Fleshy” by Federica Dauri, a work to be set afterwards, during the exhibition dates, as a sculpture.
The Festival is organized by the Coalition MARGINS Skopje and the LGBTI Support Center, and is realized with the support by the Heinrich Böll Stiftung, the European Union in the frames of the project THE TIME IS NOW, Foundation Open Society Macedonia -FOSM, and ILGA-Europe.
The entire Festival programme will respond to the protocols for organizing public events considering the situation with the pandemic, whereby we as organizers, in partnership with the institutions, will pay due attention to their implementation and respect.