An Alloy Made from Art and Activism, in North Macedonia
- Submitting institution
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Robert Gordon University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- Blackwood_4
- Type
- C - Chapter in book
- DOI
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10.4324/9780429269189-7
- Book title
- Art and Activism in the Age of Systemic Crisis
- Publisher
- Routledge
- ISBN
- 9780429269189
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- -
- Year of publication
- 2020
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
-
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This essay grew out of an international conference that I was selected for at the Volkenkunde Museum in Leiden, Netherlands, in December 2017. The paper
presented there was one of fifteen selected for this edited collection of essays, featuring leading international scholars such as TJ Demos and Ksenia Robbe.
The essay pivots on previous research done in North Macedonia, setting analysis of the socio-political events of 2017-19 alongside the response of artists and activists. For the artists who had found themselves on the side of civil society and democratic grass roots organisations during the authoritarian populist years of Nikola Gruevski (2006-17), the essay sought to set out how artist practices tempered in an alloy with activism, during times of protest, mutated and changed as a “new normality” of democracy emerged since the early summer of 2017.
Focusing on artists strategies such as collectivism, humour and offering a case study of Filip Jovanovski and Ivana Vaseva’s art-activist project TEKSTIL in the textile centre of Shtip in the south of the country, the essay offers a first assessment of the awkward transition of artists from an “oppositional” to a “hegemonic” position in local cultural ecologies, and assesses the effectiveness of art-activist strategies in an era still characterised by profound socio-political change, with North Macedonia now firmly established on a new Euro-Atlanticist integration path
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
