Critical Art in Contemporary Macedonia.
- Submitting institution
-
Robert Gordon University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- Blackwood_1
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
-
-
- Publisher
- Bloomsbury Publishing
- ISBN
- 9786086598709
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- December
- Year of publication
- 2016
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
-
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This project was funded by the Carnegie Trust for the Universities in Scotland (£3,000) and was the first book published under the Research Incentive Grant
scheme (see https://d1ssu070pg2v9i.cloudfront.net/pex/carnegie_trust_universities/2018/12/18110419/CTUS-Annual-Report-2015-16.pdf p. 3). The book was the first serious critical examination, in English, that treated the subject of contemporary art in Macedonia, and is still the only source available on this subject.
The research process saw two months of field-work in Macedonia interviewing 25 artists, curators and cultural workers, at all stages of career, to provide the broadest possible subsection of opinion. The youngest participant was 25 whilst the most senior included the country’s leading art critic, Nebojša Vilić, a past representative of Macedonia at the Venice Biennale, Igor Toševski, and former directors of the Musuem of Macedonia and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Macedonia (Bojan Ivanov, and Zoran Petrovski). The research was based on long periods of participatory observation on contemporary art in Macedonia; I built on contacts built up during periods living there in 2012.
The book featured a significant original critical essay placing the work of the artists in a historical, critical and social context and accounting for the difficult choices artists faced making critical art in the context of a “managed” democracy led by an authoritarian populist government. The interview transcripts, agreed by the artists, ensured that the voices of the artists who participated were heard as loudly as mine.
The book was launched in Skopje in September 2016, and in the UK in November 2016. Of a print run of 500 over 250 have sold within Macedonia and beyond. At the UK launch, in Aberdeen, an exhibition of Macedonian video art, Imaginarium, featured the work of eleven artists, all of them in the book, as a means for the audience to engage further with them book’s theme.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -