Overcoming Art is an exhibition curated by Ivana (Ivna) Samandova, a visual artist, and Angela Vitanovska, an art historian, that focuses on the consequences for art, and artists, of the pandemic that we are all still living through. The project, initially, was focused on cultural activity beyond Skopje, and involved travel and discussion with citizens about their experience of culture, their perceptions of contemporary art, and what agency they felt they had in shaping that experience.

The pandemic changed the focus of the discussion fundamentally, away from the survival of art and culture beyond the capital, to the survival of art as a category and institution itself. Using digital media, such as video or photography, Darko Aleksovski, Jasmina Runevska Todorovska, Goran Ristovski, Gjorgje Jovanovikј, Ana Jovanovska and Sonja Stavrova offered their works as a refracted view of the social, economic, political or psychological setback experienced in the Covid-19 era. These artists offered a unique attempt to pour their thoughts into a visual expression that reflects the relation presence-absence of the artist, the existential weakness and uncertainty, the yearning to break free from the “new reality”. The works that you will see meditate on the experience of making art in isolation in the last year, whilst the accompanying publication, featuring essays by the project curators, and Jon Blackwood and Bojan Ivanov, open out the terrain that these works consider and, further, invites you to add to the developing debate.