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"We
are discontinued beings,
individuals who die lonely
in an incomprehensible adventure,
and yet we feel the yearning
for the lost continuity" (Bataille)
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Iskra
Dimitrova's project, Memento mori*, conceived and carried
out in the 'shelters' of the Museum, is a kind of spatial
inscription of the idea of death. Everything serves this idea:
the abandonment of the exhibition rooms of the Museum; the
isolated position of the space in the subterranean part of
the Museum; the stairs which we must descend; the inaccessibility
to outdoor light; the isolation of sounds; separation, darkness...
as if in a tomb... We are involved in a ritual of "absorption
of death"**: death freed from its instrumental, everyday
meaning and raised to the level of symbolic exchange.
Thanatometamorphosis,
Bridal Chamber and Remains are three situations
of experiencing and coming face to face with death.
I Thanatometamorphosis: black room with a black body
(corpse);
II
Bridal Chamber: white room with
a white body (soul);
III Remains: white room
with a contorted body (corpse or fetus?).
Despite
its
poetic overtones, despite its references to certain general
paradigmatic and symbolic situations (the symbolism of the
circle), Iskra Dimitrova's cryptosofy gives an odious impression.
And it is precisely here that the paradox of the experience
of death lies, to which the Memento mori environment
alludes: surrounded by death every day, we no longer notice
it. "Persecuted and censored everywhere, death springs
from everywhere. This time no longer as apocalyptic folklore
- the kind that could preoccupy the imagination of certain
epochs - but, deprived of any imaginary substance whatsoever,
it turns into the most banal reality and takes the form of
the very principle of reality that governs our lives."******
"My
death everywhere, my death that dreams"*******
*Remember that you must die, mediaeval carnivals organized
with the purpose of reminding people of the existence of death,
to which Iskra Dimitrova refers.
**Jean Baudrillard, Simbolicka razmena i smrt (L'Echange symbolique
et la mort), Decje novine, Gornji Milanovac, 1991
*** Ibid.
**** Ibid.
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I
installation of
the project Memento mori
Museum of Contemporary Art, Skopje, Macedonia, 1997
solo exhibition
curator Liljana Nedelkovska
Iskra
Dimitrova:"To
make a cast of your own body is a wish to see your own death,
your own corpse
in a process of thanatometamorphosis, and also to see yourself in another
situation of creating a different body."
Thanatometamorphosis: black room with a glass 'coffin' in which
a cast of the artist's body is placed. The cast is life-size and full-faced,
so placed as to 'sink' into the
dense, black liquid which surrounds it. The gruesome, dismal representation
of
death through the cast expresses the unbearable distress of facing death.
This
'corpse'-cast, enclosed within the sullen, sickly, dark side of experience,
looks
rejected, deserted. There is no possibility of transcendence here. Here
we
"experience death as a 'real' inevitability imprinted into our
body." *
*Jean
Baudrillard,( L'Echange symbolique et la mort), Decje novine, Gornji
Milanovac, 1991
Text
by Liljana Nedelkovska, curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Skopje,
Macedonia
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