2015 In pursuit of the impossible, Serious Interest Galery, Skopje, Macedonia

Nikola Uzunovski as part of the showcase of his work entitled “Looking for the Impossible”, presents the outcome of his decade long research and the history of his efforts to bring to life his most ambitious project yet, “My Sunshine, (2005-ongoing). This project is the result of comprehensive research and a number of collaborations, starting in 2005 with his artistic residence in Finland and the directly experiencing the harsh conditions of the Arctic Polar Circle. This open-ended project has been exhibited in various countries, the most important of which was the presentation as part of the official program of the Venice Biennale in 2009. He later embarked on other projects, such as “Solar Clouds” (2013-ongoing) and “Thermal-Solar Aircrafts” (2014-ongoing), which have been born out of the vast experience gained from the years of work on the different stages of the original project, as well as through the modifications of the results and the potential arising from the produced prototypes.

Collected under the umbrella title “Looking for the Impossible”, these ideas/projects, though already individually presented at various international exhibitions, are for the first time showcased as a whole in the SIA Gallery in Skopje. This has taken the form of a research laboratory, but at the same time of an archive of the ongoing process of research which has yielded sketches, blueprints, animations, models, graphs and photographic documentation. All of them can be located in the space in-between art and science, visions of the future and about pressing social issues, positioned at the cross-road where the poetic, the political and the hyper-technological intersect.

The period of the research undertaken by Uzunovski almost coincides with the period in which Macedonian society slowly enters its second transition phase. Through the actions of the ideological apparatus, our society has further developed an openly conservative and starkly anti-intellectual environment with visible signs of authoritarianism. The evident tendency to abolish the political understood as democratic antagonism, accompanied by the most brutal neo-liberal agendas for the ultimate abolishing of the social in the interest of the private, without any respect for equality. It is exactly this context that makes these project particularly interesting, especially if one considers the issue of what is possible, here and now, as opposed to the is desired for the future.

Excerpt from the text by Vladimir Janchevski, “Was Yesterday’s Tomorrow Better?, or How Can We Learn to Love the Future”, published in the catalogue for the exhibition.