This new edition of the series “One Artwork, One Debate” at the French Institute in Skopje will propose a dialogue between the work of French painter Clément Bedel and that of Macedonian artist Hristina Ivanoska.
Taking as a point of departure architectural and monumental forms connected to the post-Yugoslav space, the two practices address, in different yet productive ways, the question of monumental heritage and its afterlives.
Clément Bedel’s paintings explore the affective charge of these architectures: what they retain of presence, ambiguity, and persistence in the present. By contrast, Makedonium – Dramaturgy of the Unfinished (2023), a project by Hristina Ivanoska and Yane Calovski based on long-term archival research into the Kruševo Monument (1979), engages more directly with the narratives, representations, and political implications attached to this heritage. Through an installation combining archival documents and video — staging, for instance, the negotiations that led to the monument’s construction, or imagining the parts of the project that were ultimately abandoned in its final realization — Ivanoska examines the making of monumental narratives and their contemporary afterlives, refusing to treat them as merely aesthetic forms.
As in each edition of the series, the exhibition will serve as the starting point for a broader public conversation between the artists, the curator, and the audience.
Clément Bedel (Strasbourg, 1993) develops a pictorial practice attentive to architectural, industrial, and monumental forms. His paintings tend toward abstraction without entirely abandoning their grounding in built structures: fragments of monuments, modernist volumes, silhouettes of buildings, urban or memorial masses. Rather than representing architecture as a stable object, his canvases test its material and affective persistence. They question the ways in which certain forms continue to inhabit public space and memory, even when their original function has become obscured.
The artistic practice of internationally recognized Macedonian artists Hristina Ivanoska and Yane Calovski, developed since the 2000s, is both complex and contextual. It engages with questions related to architecture, history, art theory, and contemporary political realities, in order to produce new creative processes, new exhibition narratives, and new forms of knowledge. Their works unfold across different media, from drawing and text to objects, installation, and video.
Exhibited Works
Clément Bedel, Concrete Ghosts, oil on canvas, 190 × 190 cm, 2025
Clément Bedel, Untitled, oil on canvas, 50 × 40 cm, 2026
Clément Bedel, Metabolism of Ghosts, oil on canvas, 30 × 24 cm, 2024
Hristina Ivanoska and Yane Calovski, Makedonium: Dramaturgy of the Unfinished
2023, digital film, 41 min 09 sec. Production: Press to Exit Project Space, Skopje
Directed by Macedonian filmmaker Teona Strugar Mitevska, the film combines dramatization and reenactment to explore questions of authorship, gender, and erasure in the context of late Yugoslav modernism. Based on a script by Hristina Ivanoska and a visual concept by Yane Calovski, it revisits the bureaucratic and political forces that prevented the full recognition of Iskra Grabuloska as co-author of the Makedonium. The film stages the struggle surrounding this recognition and raises a central question: can a monument be considered complete when its history remains unfinished?
Yane Calovski and Hristina Ivanoska, Makedonium: Dramaturgy of the Unfinished
2024, series of 12 colour inkjet digital prints, 100 × 70 cm.
This series of prints makes visible the editorial and archival work that structures Makedonium: Dramaturgy of the Unfinished. Both visual and textual, it refers to the 2020 publication and distinguishes several layers of research: the history of the monument, texts devoted to its historical value, and Hristina Ivanoska and Yane Calovski’s own artistic propositions. The prints thus give form to the archive as a process, rather than as a mere repository of documents.
Yane Calovski and Hristina Ivanoska, Makedonium: Dramaturgy of the Unfinished
2020, book, Macedonian and English
The publication brings together archival documents, technical drawings, historical texts, and artistic propositions around the Ilinden Monument / Makedonium. It combines two approaches: Hristina Ivanoska’s performative methodology, If a Story is Present, and Yane Calovski’s spatial study, Restrained Space (Affected by Your Actions). By assembling materials drawn in particular from the Grabuloski collection held at the State Archives of the Republic of North Macedonia, the book functions both as a research tool and as an artwork: it makes the history of the monument legible, as well as the silences, conflicts, and absences that have accompanied it.
More on the event: French Institute in Skopje / Press
Images: Una Nikoloska