06 Sep An art project by Velimir Zernovski
On the occasion of Independence Day – 8th September, the public spaces in the City of Skopje will be the venue for the art project “All Beauty Must Die” by the author Velimir Zernovski. Setting up Zernovski’s drawings as billboards in the public space represents a project of art criticism targeting the foundational assumptions of nation-building and independence.
The artist opens spaces for all those who are excluded and marginalized in the state celebrations of this holiday. It initiates criticism of the violence as a product of the nationalistic, masculinist and normative sociality. The criticism of nationalism and its masculine logic simultaneously becomes criticism of the “search for the roots” in the distant antiquity.
Our experience is provincial. This is the grave and insufferable truth that Velimir Zernovski’s project is striving to faces us with, a project in which masculinity, dominant politics the provincial mind are intermingled. “All Beauty Must Die” is not simply a reflection of the provincial experience and mind, rather a project that opens a counter-provincial perspective, bordering with the scandalous, with the logic of the taboo. Including masculinity in the project has the goal to strip, problematize, ironize, as well as transform the century-old relation between politics and manhood. Zernovski’s choice of naked male bodies in the drawings unfolds the body itself as the locus of the gender apparatus of power.
All beauty must die!
Another world is possible!
The project is supported by the Coalition “Sexual and Health Rights of Marginalized Communities” and the Open Society Foundations New York.