Manifesta purposely strives to keep its distance from what are often seen as the dominant centres of artistic production, instead seeking fresh and fertile terrain for the mapping of a new cultural topography.

Hristina Ivanoska, MK

The artistic practice of Hristina Ivanoska is entangled with issues of suppression, control and construction of collective memory as it relates to women’s resistance strategies and politics. She validates handcraft such as embroidery, weaving, pottery and quilting as mediums of political and social value and as a representation of individual struggles and limitations.

Since 2000, she has been collaborating with the artist Yane Calovski; together, they represented North Macedonia at the 56th Venice Bienniale (2015). In 2004, Ivanoska and Calovski co-founded ‘press to exit project space’—a platform for artistic research and curatorial practices, in Skopje. Ivanoska is currently a PhD-in-Practice candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna.

Creating situations that ‘were and were not’, Ivanoska in her performances becomes a flexible and porous entity, a medium through which different identities are brought back to life. Her body of work emphasises the lack of recognition of women’s history in Macedonian society and its links to current forms of political activism and theory.