Ivana Mirchevska (b.1992, Skopje) is a visual artist and a researcher whose practice is rooted in time-based media, visual anthropology, memory studies and painting. Through experimenting in the hybridizing genre of the documentary, she investigates how technologies of vision work to create subjects and subjectivity. In particular, she looks at the ambivalence of the image in re/presenting the realities of labor, gender, media, surveillance, while searching for the aesthetic potential of the individual and collective body to generate viable propositions and strategies. Using the essayistic as a frame, her practice spans between moving images, archives and installations. Ivana holds a BFA in painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Skopje (2015) and MFA in visual arts from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan, Italy (2018/2019).
She is the co-author of the exhibition Thresholds of no-body in particular, in collaboration with Elena Chemerska, in YCC Gallery-Skopje, for the FIRSTBORN GIRL Festival, (2020). She had participated in Fuori Visioni Festival 6| Tra muro e confine-Atto I e II, Piacenza, Italy (2020-2021); The Biennial of Young Artists, MOCA- Skopje (2021) AIR program of The Hub of Ephemeral — hidden in sight, Galerija Miroslav Kraljević, Zagreb, Croatia; AIR program The Voids- Culture Hub Croatia, Split (2020); ENGAGE- Public school for Social Engagement in Artistic Research, curated by Viafarini, DOCVA Fabbrica del Vapore, Milan, Italy (2017). Her video-essay SHE has been published at PHROOM – a Milan based international research platform for contemporary photography and video art (2019) and exhibited at the Utopic Method, International exhibition for Video narration in Granada (2019), Spain and ‘Zapping the archive’ Odesa Photo Days Festival 2020, Odessa, Ukraine (2020).
Ivana is part of the curatorial team of the festival Underground is easier to Breathe organized by Kula Collective.
Ivana’s work draws on the way images inhabit our bodies and how our bodies are subjected to the economy of vision.
Elena Chemerska (1991) is a visual artist and researcher from Skopje, North Macedonia whose work explores the relationships between aesthetics, materiality and politics. Her main interest lies in thinking through artistic means about the ways in which humans create the basis for the future in relation to memory and the attempt to grasp history in its image. Within her practice, she uses and combines different media and strategies to accentuate and stratify narratives woven into cultural structures where the particular and the universal converge. Her work materializes through painting, drawings, objects, video and interventions in the public sphere.
She holds a Master in Art and Design in Fine Arts from the Master Institute of Visual Cultures, AKV St. Joost Academy of Art and Design, ‘s-Hertogenbosch, the Netherlands.
Her work has been presented in North Macedonia and internationally. Exhibitions include: “Thresholds of No-body in Particular” in collaboration with Ivana Mirchevska, YCC, Skopje (2020); Fuori Visioni Festival 6 | Il confine-Atto II, Piacenza, Italy (2021); The Biennial of Young Artists, MOCA- Skopje (2021); AIR program of The Hub of Ephemeral — hidden in sight, Galerija Miroslav Kraljević, Zagreb, Croatia; “Monumental Fluxus”, Expoplu, Nijmegen (2019); “Monument to Freedom- Conversations”, Private Print Studio, Skopje (2019); “Transition” video screening program, Eye Museum, Amsterdam (2018) etc. In 2021 she received the Denes Award for Young Visual Artist up to 35 in North Macedonia.
She is currently based between Skopje, North Macedonia and Berlin, Germany.
Elena’s interest draws from the ways in which we create a basis for the future in relation to memory and the way we attempt to grasp history in its image.