Anastasija Pandilovska
Anastasija Pandilovska (Skopje, 1991) is a visual and research artist whose practice oftentimes embraces curating as part of her working method. Working with drawings, texts, objects, and matter she accentuates latent narratives whose significance influences how we give meanings and relate to our surroundings. Pandilovska graduated from the Inter-architecture department of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie. Her work has been presented in the Netherlands and internationally. In 2016 she received the EEKMAN Art Prize for contemporary drawing during “Art on Paper” Art Fair, BOZAR, Brussels. She received the Stipendium for Emerging Artists by the Mondriaan Fonds for the year 2020/2021. Since 2018, she is cocurator at Suns and Stars. Pandilovska is the editor and designer of the book Persistent Traces of Heritage to Come published in the context of the international project Collective Domain of Cultural Memory.
The research of Pandilovska focuses on the way an intrusively altered built environment can grow into a generator of new forms of ‘publicness’. Moulding her research by investigating the ‘antiquization’ of her hometown Skopje, Pandilovska considers the potential of ‘publicness’ as a process and a practice that embraces conflict, in which both public space and cultural heritage manifest themselves as articulated constructs.
Starting from 2010, the city center of Skopje underwent a large-scale reconstruction through the project “Skopje 2014” initiated by the government. Attempting to erase the socialist footprint of the city’s history and to further confirm the ruling authority, a substantial lot of the city center changed and places affording leisure and movement became occupied. Drawing on the fragmented and dissonant points of view that are encountered when discussing the effects of the transformation, Pandilovska engages with the idea of turning the dissensus between those dissonances into a tool for foregrounding not the different standpoints, but rather understanding the point in which one stands. Nurturing the new public space created through the friction can allow for the inaudible voices to be heard and make space where dwellers can exercise ‘publicness’.
Pandilovska’s research will develop into an exhibition, a symposium, and a publication. As part of her research process, she will work towards an exhibition/book that will be published as part of the yearly program of Suns and Stars in the second half of 2021. The book will be an atlas in which she explores the contradictory sensations and properties of the building materials that can be traced in the city of Skopje and the frictive qualities which demonstrate different ideas about public space and heritage.
https://anastasijapandilovska.hotglue.me
On Bending Yesterday’s Weight – Aligning Matter Into Presence