Within the framework of the international ZINE VITRINE call for zines, visual artist Nevena Aleksovski presents her solo exhibition Now You Are Yourself and Not yet Yourself. In the series of drawings, the author thematises the fragility of certain psychological conditions and social roles, using an expressive, intimistic, fragmentary artistic language.
The drawings explore the fields of irony, playfulness, melancholy, anxiety and disassociation. The simple, rough line drawing is complemented by coloured inserts and emphases, creating the materiality of the author’s pen stroke through various techniques. Through the prism of personal, intimate experiences, she deals with the relativity of social and personal relations, the internalization of the individual’s everyday as compared to the globalised world, and the fluidity of various identity positions. The relations between individual and society, man and nature, subject and object, the real and the imaginary, multiply in the drawings through multifaceted artistic signs, visual rebuses that offer different readings, avoiding direct interpretations and establishing distance through the promise of closeness.
The author will accompany the exhibition with a new zine of the same title.
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Each year, the ZINE VITRINE exhibition, workshop and zine reading room programme, located in the DobraVaga Gallery, invites artists of various profiles to participate in the international call for zines, with the selected artists realizing an exhibition or zine production, as well as a broader presentation of their creative work or specific ideas. According to last year’s jury, visual artist Nevena Aleksovski‘s zine Obljudenost (2016) stood out among the submissions received.
Justification of the jury: “Obljudenost is a drawing project that displays excellent understanding of the zine medium and photocopying. At first glance a simple pink compendium of character drawings, cumbersome doodles, unfinished or crossed motifs and floating words develops its perfection in overlapping compositions, markers shining through, and effects achieved through photocopying, playing with blackness and wilful exploitation of mistakes. The automatisms, naïve portraits, random curves, body parts and abstracted bouquets thus create balanced spreads of patterns and recognisable motifs, rounding the zine off into a comprehensive graphic product.”
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Nevena Aleksovski (1984) graduated in painting from the Academy of Arts in Novi Sad in 2008 and got her MA in Cultural Studies at the Faculty of Social Sciences in Ljubljana in 2014. She is active in the fields of drawing, painting, illustration and art zines. In 2016, she got first prize at the ZINE VITRINE dvatwozwei international call for zines for her art zine. Her work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Slovenia, Serbia, Germany and Croatia, including the Zines! Contemporary Zine Production group exhibition at the International Centre of Graphic Arts, the Neki piše group exhibition at the Vodnik Homestead gallery, and the Kaj je tvoje, nič ni tvoje! group exhibition at the Alkatraz Gallery, all of them in 2017. She will also participate in this year’s 36 Mountains international festival of illustration in Zagreb and the Biennial of Slovenian Independent Illustration at Kino Šiška. She is also a pedagogue at the ŠKUC and Alkatraz galleries in Ljubljana. She illustrated a collection of poetry, Ljubica Rolanda Barthesa, written by poet Ana Makuc, which received the Veronika Award in 2016. She currently lives and works in Ljubljana.
Organisation: Kino Šiška.
