Collective ZERO: Paperworks
Collective ZERO
Paperworks
The Collective Zero are active from the mid 1980ties until the early1990s. During this short period, they are an important representative of the Macedonian visual art scene even outside the borders of former Yugoslavia. Later, its members all pursue their own individual careers.
But after their eventual reunion (a discourse in their individual work) in 2009 due to the retrospective exhibition at the National Gallery of Macedonia and then later, after showing their new work The Trailer Files at this year’s 54th International Biennale in Venice, it is the first time this Collective exhibits in New York at the Gallery MC.
Paperworks is a project based on numerous photographic material constituted during the preparations of The Trailer Files which are used as propositions which try to expand the definitions of photography and its properties as a medium. The work is a unique flow between surrealism, pop art and the psychedelic. It could be seen as a mental journey via photo based montages which lure the viewer into a system founded on fantasy but in fact, steeped in reality. The process of applying drawing over various reproduction images results in a coherent culmination of a united symphony of images which at the end erases all evidence of the real. In a way, this exhibition is part of an aesthetic luggage of a journey throughout the historical dynamics of the Western Balkans, which is the group’s natural and raw environment.
The work within a collective presumes mutual connection. It establishes a correlation and thus, creates a matrix which, in this specific case, transcends from the ‘collective individualism’ to the ‘individual collective’. Its main goal is obtaining a new kind of energy, a higher and open conscience within the limits between the pre-conceptual and the eternal (from 0 to infinity) of the unique artistic expression.
Collective ZERO
Miodrag Desovski, born in Skopje, Macedonia, 1955
Aco Stankoski, born in Kichevo, Macedonia, 1959
Bedi Ibrahim, born in Skopje, Macedonia, 1959
Zlatko Trajkovski, born in Skopje, Macedonia, 1960
Igor Toshevski, born in Skopje, Macedonia, 1963
Sinisha Cvetkovski, born in Kumanovo, Macedonia, 1963
Gorancho Gjorgjievski, born in Shtip, Macedonia, 1973
Video support: Stevan Shashkov
