ECHO and NARCISSUS
(to Iskra with love and self-irony)

Video installation

Narcissm(s), Text(ures) of the (Ego)Face in the Images of the Macedonian Woman Artists

Museum of Contemporary Art, Skopje

June, 1999

curator Sonja Abadzieva

The Model of the Female Ego-anatomy

Reserved sensuality radiates from the multi media project Echo and Narcissus of Iskra Dimitrova (video projection of a psychodrama written on the face and with only traces of the body in the psychical part of the work).

The underlined ironical dedication of the project to an episode of her personal life is an act of sharing with others the pain from which, as a subject, she recuperates: the female weakness inverted into a new energy. Another substitution is made: inversion of the lost object of the libido in her own presentation - narcissism that enters the sphere of melancholy.

The most underlined type of narcissism is linked with the love of one's own body: as a whole or in parts; it does not matter, and with the same density of love as that of the mother for her child. The subject is the carrier of the object of the desire - they are one. The personal anatomy is exposed in the look of the others, directly without substitutions. It can relate to the other one as a message, information threat or spite, but essentially the artist has the starting point in the explicit exposure of the layers of his/her own mental and physical constitution. Getting accustomed to the personal anatomy implies a love for oneself, to autoerotism but also to self-analyzing, self-criticism and self-censuring.

Text by Sonja Abadzieva, Chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Skopje

Materials: glass, paper, paint, UV light, sound

Through the characters of Echo and Narcissus two approaches towards myself are elaborated: from absolute self-love to absolute self-rejection.