Guest artists’ presentations

Nikolche Slavevski, North Macedonia

Art and Politics

A decade after the crisis of 2008 that provoked deep political and economic emergencies, nothing is solved. Therefore the presentation will pose some questions as:  What is the role of Art and artists in society today? How can Art contribute to the transformation of society? Can Art be non-political at all? Further the questions of the relations of industrial production and cultural production and services will be confronted, as these processes are all processes of commodification; everything that is produced becomes a commodity because of the general mode of production. Art is not an exception.

CV: Nikolche Slavevski (born in 1989 in Bitola, Macedonia) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Skopje, painting in the class of Prof. Zaneta Vangeli. He has been active in Leftist movement Solidarity , member of the Initiative Board and Central Committee of Levica (The Left) and also member of Marxist Organization CRVENI (REDS) , a volunteer Section of the International Marxist organization for Former Yugoslavia. He had his first solo exhibition titled Painted it Red at the Center for Culture – Bitola in 2017 and took part in numerous group shows, as Pop Up AKTO Festival, 2017, Bitola, Macedonia; 3rd International Exhibition of Artists and Art Teachers , 2017, Evora, Portugal and others.

Sandra Lieners, Luxembourg

Visual and conceptual fragmentation in contemporary painting

Sandra Lieners integrates into her work the most recent aspects of figuration. She refers to postmodernism while combining formal configurations inherited from Cubist and Dadaist collages, but all seen through the glasses of pop art.

CV: Sandra Lieners (born in 1990 in Luxembourg) graduated in 2016 from the University of Applied Arts in Vienna with an exchange stay at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence. The most important of her three solo shows so far was in 2016 at CAPE – Center for plurial arts in Ettelbrück. Her works are in different private and public collections such as the Museum for art and history (MNHA), the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Culture in Luxembourg. In 2017, she was invited to New York for a Painting and Mixed Media artist residency with a concluding exhibition. Lieners is the youngest laureate of the Pierre Werner price and was nominated for the Edward Steichen Award in 2017.

Vikenti Komitski, Bulgaria

Seeing as Habit

The presentation will depart from the psychoanalytical concept of the Mirror Stage as developed by Jacques Lacan that proposes that human infants pass through a stage in which an external image of the body gives rise to the mental representation of an "I". Komitski claims that such recognition of one’s own image is a base ground of human subjectivity, and that from that moment on the world keeps being perceived as an image. René Magritte’s painting Not To Be Reproduced (1937) will be used as an illustration to the talk that also relates to topics of deconstruction and reproduction of the image in artistic context. In the last part of  the  presentation Komitski will make reference to W. J. T. Mitchell’s book What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images (2006) and to a proper artistic practice.

CV: Vikenti Komitski (born in 1983, Sofia ) graduated Sculpture at the National Academy of Art in Sofia. He works in a vast variety of media including installation, video and photography. His work often relates to theory and psychoanalysis, sometimes in a critical or ironic way. Some of his solo shows were at Joey Ramone Gallery, Rotterdam, Krinzinger gallery, Vienna (2015) and at ICA Sofia (2013). He lives and works in Berlin.