We are all in this alone

We are all in this alone by Hristina Ivanoska and Yane Calovski studies and
questions the notion of faith in today’s concurrent and multiple socio-political
conditions. The project references a number of intricate sources: a fresco painting
from the church of St. Gjorgi (St. Gorge) in Kurbinovo painted by an unknown author in
the 12th Century, as well as writings by Simone Weil, Luce Irigaray, and recently
discovered personal notes by Paul Thek dating from the 1970s. While searching
for political values in the representations of formal aesthetic and literary sources,
the work carries a specific urgency to articulate ways we continuously engage and
disengage the past and the present, questioning the notion of faith within socio-politics
and economic realities.
The church, as the point of departure and inspiration, has a perfect rectangular shape
that is filled with exceptional fresco paintings following a sense of symmetry and order.
The project was first translated and applied to the 45m2 gallery space of Kunsthalle
Baden Baden. With the continual expansion of the project, the challenge this time was
to translate and locate the project to a bigger space at Sale d’Armi, Arsenale, while being
loyal to the former stages of the project. The utmost important aspect of the spatial design
was to communicate the capacity of the project to achieve metabolic inter-conversions of
its segments to the audience in a compact way. Therefore, an exact-sized room was located
at the centre of the gallery space, allowing the audience to walk around and discover the
physicality of this mathematical process. Hence, it is also important to acknowledge that
the gallery space welcomes the audience with the film Detail (1999-2015) as a prelude to
the project, which was a revisiting and reprocessing of Calovski’s first work on Paul Thek.
Presenting this specific work is a humble gesture, to keep things open, suspended in the
way of closure as in form and content in the context of this collective work of the artists.
Furthermore, the backside of the room was designed to function as a library to contain the
books of the project. The spines of the books, which extract white and gold texture from
the installation, form new fresco-like sceneries in the space. The foreword and backward
looping scene in the video support and stimulate the circular and linear body movements
of the audience in the gallery space.