Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia - Biennale Arte 2015

We Are All In This Alone by Hristina Ivanoska and Yane Calovski addresses 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 in Kurbinovo, painted by an unknown author in the 12th Century, as well as writings by Simone Weil, Luce Irigaray, and 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 from the present while questioning the notion of faith.

Hristina Ivanoska’s drawings and objects are inspired by the texts of Simone Weil and Luce Irigaray. Weil questions her faith in God, considering it as a personal decision and path that one goes through alone. On the other hand, Irigaray explains the emotional and inexplicable (love) relation toward God in her essay “La Mystérique” (from the book Speculum de l’autre femme, 1974), asking: “But how does one tackle these things, even if one feels passionately about them, if there is no sense of vocation?”

Yane Calovski’s drawings and collages refer to recently discovered correspondences of Paul Thek in the Marzona Collection in Berlin, addressing the difficulty to survive while creating, producing and maintaining ones own work and keeping faith in the idealism of collaborative production. Additionally, addressing the value of hidden poetics in the details positioned well beyond the mundane clichés of one’s own need to produce language, Calovski literally paints invisible (erased) icons, procured through the physical disposal of the image as a religious symbol.

The project also incorporates a short film as a prelude, which further addresses faith not only as an emotional and intellectual condition, but also as a contemporary socio-political anomaly.