1998, Museum of Contemporary Art, Skopje Radiations - Recent Macedonian fine art
curator: Sonja Abadzieva
1999, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden
After the Wall: Art and culture in post-Communist Europe
curator: Bojana Pejic
2000,
Japan Foundation Forum, Tokyo, Japan Radiations - Recent Macedonian fine art
curator: Sonja Abadzieva
In the past few
years Iskra Dimitrova has replaced her performative body with a double:
with a cast of her own body. As a result of self-observation, in her
installation Umbilical Cord, a silicon cast of the artist stomach area
is placed as if on a sterilized operating table. Steam comes out of
the base of this separated piece of 'flesh' and forms the vital pulse
of the transition from a closed world to external reality. The aquatic
symbolism (amniotic fluid) is also suggested by the bubbling of the
water in the sterilizer and the atmosphere is fully articulated by the
voice of the artist and the smell of iodoform.
The
structure of silicon encompasses the tactile quality (sliminess, amorphousness,
warmth). The symbolic rhetoric has many layers, but can be reduced to
the questionof the female body torn between renewal and disintegration.
The
ontological structure of the problem develops through taming the antagonism
between birth and death. The body, in this sense, is not a place one
disdains, but a place from which mysteriuos and partly alluring processes
radiate. More specifically, the navel is a witness-sign of the latent
pre-life (of a body within a body), of the act of separation from the
womb of an other (a body from a body) and of the subject-body (independent
body). Delving into these states presupposes the ideas of time and space.
Sonja
Abadzieva, In: Iskra Dimitrova, (Aus)Strahlungen,
Bildende Kunst der Gegenwart aus Mazedonien/
Radiations, Recent Macedonian Fine Art, Museum of Contemporary Art,
Skopje, 1998 (cat.exh.)
Materials: silicone cast
of the authors' torso, table, steam, Plexiglas, authors' voice
