Transfiguring

Exhibition of contemporary Macedonian art held on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations with Macedonia. Open November 28, 2014 - January 10, 2015.

Transfiguration means a change of one thing into another, transition, metamorphosis, transmutation, modification, redefinition, revision, variation, etc. These and many other parallel meanings are omnipresent in the everyday lives of socially conscious artists and can easily be found in the creative explorations of many Macedonian contemporary artists in a variety of media.

Often in art theory there have been attempts to categorize art as transformation. Dante's understood art as an artifact that fulfills a certain meaning associated with artistic intention, or ¨the cause of things¨ i.e. a transfigured object. Shusterman viewed transfiguration as a matter of transforming perception, meaning, usefulness and attitude and transforming reality in the public eye. Here the reference to "real transfiguration" with Christian meaning should also be mentioned, which is the transformation of Jesus Christ in front of the apostles, a metaphor for the “artistic subtle wonderworking of transforming objects and situations from our surrounding into works of art.” 

Examples of transfiguration in art is also the decision of the artist or the critics to declare something as a work of art. They consider the work’s medium, concept and ontological or epistemological nature

In a contemporary sense and in the Macedonian context, transfiguration can be determined on several levels: first in the artist himself, caused by his personal feeling or as an idea for his social existence (personal feeling, introspection); then as purely aesthetic and visual transformation, i.e. formally (in which by using purely artistic elements the change is determined), and by conceptually founded reference (reinterpretation, redefinition of old historical artistic examples); as an observation and personal view of the social transition in which the social element plays an incredibly large role (dominance of social networks as a communication media). Parameters also include aspects of such as personal transfiguration, identifiable transitivity (belonging), aesthetic and purely formal transition, social transformation, sex, audio, sensual, ironic and other type of transfiguration. 

Participating artists: Jovan Shumkovski, Gjorgje Jovanovic, Irena Paskali, Velimir Zhernovski, Mirna Arsova, Marija Sotirovska, Igor Toshevski, Nada Prlja, Igor Sekovski, Antoni Maznevski, Boris Shemov, OPA, Iskra Dimitrova, Aleksandar Spasoski, Atanas Botev, Zhaneta Vangeli, Vana Uroshevic, Aleksandar Stankovski, Dijana Bogdanovska, Blagoja Manevski, Slavica Janeshlieva 

Curator: Ana Frangovska