The Touch is the North Macedonian iteration of FUTURE ECOLOGIES, a programme from WE ARE HERE: Artists’ Moving Images from the British Council Collection and LUX.
The Touch is an exhibition that refers to the ‘deadly touch’ of humans, which leave behind, consciously or unconsciously, immense damage to the planet, its living species and their habitats. The exhibition presents five UK artists and three Macedonian artists and projects that deal with issues such as ecology, migration, identity, marginalisation and finding beauty in ugliness.
The exhibition was accompanied by a public programme with various events that explored art as a medium to raise awareness about environmental issues. Audience was able to tap into online conversations with artists and curators, participate in panel discussions and take part in curatorial guided tours and workshops exploring topics such as ecology, moving image and accessibility.
Curator of the exhibition is Ana Frangovska, a creative and dynamic arts professional that has worked as a senior curator at the Macedonian National Gallery for the past 15 years.
The exhibition was launched on 15 September 2021, in the Multimedia Centre Mala Stanica which is a part of Macedonian National Gallery, at 20.00 hrs and was opened for audience until 15 October 2021. Find pictures from the exhibition here.
About the curator
Ana Frangovska is a creative and dynamic arts professional with twenty years curatorial, educational and research experience in the contemporary visual arts. She has worked as senior curator at the Macedonian National Gallery for the past fifteen years. Ana Frangovska is a PhD candidate of Transdisciplinary studies in Contemporary Arts and Media at the Faculty of Arts and Media in Belgrade, Serbia. She has curated and organized a great number of institutional and non-independent projects in the country and abroad and was a curator of the Pavilion of Republic of Macedonia at the 55th Venice Biennale, Italy in 2013 for the project ‘Silentiopathologia’ from the artist Elpida Hadzi-Vasileva.
Artists' biographies
Uriel Orlow - lives and works between London, Lisbon and Zurich. Orlow’s practice is research-based, process-oriented and multi-disciplinary including film, photography, drawing and sound. He is known for single screen film works, lecture performances and modular, multi-media installations that focus on specific locations and micro-histories. His work is concerned with spatial manifestations of memory, blind spots of representation and forms of haunting.
Louis Henderson - a filmmaker and writer who experiments with different ways of working with people to address and question our current global condition defined by racial capitalism and ever-present histories of the European colonial project. Since 2017, Henderson has been working within the artist group The Living and the Dead Ensemble. Based between Haiti and France, they focus on theatre, song, slam, poetry and cinema, their first feature film Ouvertures was awarded a FIPRESCI special mention at the 70th Berlin International Film Festival 2020. His work has been shown in various international film festivals, art museums and biennials and is distributed by LUX and Video Data Bank. He lives and works in Paris.
Charlotte Prodger - a Glasgow-based artist working with moving image, writing, sculpture and printmaking. She was the winner of the 2018 Turner Prize and represented Scotland at the 2019 Venice Biennale. She received the 2017 Paul Hamlyn Award and the 2014 Margaret Tait Award.
Ben Rivers - studied sculpture before moving into photography and super8 film. After his degree he taught himself 16mm filmmaking and hand-processing. His practice as a filmmaker treads a line between documentary and fiction.
Bedwyr Williams - lives and works in Caernarfon, Wales. Williams’ sculptures, painting, performances and video are influenced by his own life experiences. His work merges art and life with an idiosyncratic twist that is instantaneously sympathetic and relational, and he offers a sharp critique of our everyday world, and a celebration of the obscure and overlooked.
Kristina Pulejkova - a Macedonian artist based between Skopje, North Macedonia and London, UK. Her inter-disciplinary practice is informed by science and technology. Kristina’s work explores how the use of technology might lead to greater forms of sustainability in human-nature relationships. Working across moving image, sound and installation, she aims to build subjective narratives based on scientific data and principles. In her work, she tends to imagine voices from creatures, objects and even atoms in order to inhabit non-human perspectives. Through use of immersive technology, Kristina’s works often deal with environmental issues, telling personal stories that place audiences at the centre of the scene, allowing for a protagonist’s perspective and a different way of seeing.
Velimir Zernovski - free-lance artist based in Skopje that got BA and MA from the Faculty of Fine Arts, Ss. Cyril and Methodius University - Skopje. Through the media of drawings, videos, installations, object installations in public space, writing, artist book publishing and stage design, he explores notions of identity, urbanity and popular culture. He realized solo exhibitions in North Macedonia and abroad and took part in group exhibitions in Slovenia, Kosovo, Austria, Germany, Netherlands, Macedonia, Turkey and USA. His practice is in particular marked by three long-term projects including Alice, what else is out there?, 2007 – 2010, DISTITLED series, 2010 – 2015 focused on the gender issues and inequality and BEYOND THE BLACKNESS series, 2015 – till present day, focused on notions of space exploration, astrophysics and astropolitics.
Elpida Hadzi-Vasileva - a contemporary visual artist based in UK working across sculpture, installation, video, sound, photography and architectural interventions. Her materials range from the extraordinary to the ordinary and the ephemeral or, the discarded to the highly precious; they include organic matter, foodstuffs and precious metals. Central to her practice is a response to the particularities of a place, its history, locale, environment and communities. She was commissioned by the Vatican as part of the Pavilion of the Holy See, at the 56th International Art Exhibition, and represented Macedonia at the 55th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia.