Document Missing: Broken Document Breaks out into Poetry, 2022, installation, as part of the exhibition Good as Hell: Voicing Resistance, National Library, Prishtina, curated by Catherine Nichols, creative mediator for Manifesta 14 Prishtina, © Hristina Ivanoska. Photo © Manifesta 14 Prishtina / Ivan Erofeev. https://manifesta14.org/participant/hristina-ivanoska/
-Text by Catherine Nichols in the catalogue Otherwise, Manifesta 14 Prishtina 2022
Rosa Plaveva – who, yo ask? – should be remembered, but isn’t. The Macedonian pendant to Rosa Luxemburg, Plaveva spent decades fighting for the rights of women and workers. Born in 1878 in Veles, she died in 1970 in Belgrade, yet story of political resistance that unfolded between those two dates has been largely erased and forgotten. Can Plaveva be revived as a historical figure? Can she regain her voice? Can any truth be gleaned from the fragments? Such questions for the bases of Hristina Ivanoska’s long-tern research project Document Missing: The Intricate Sense of Truth in Oral Histories, which began in 2014. Adopting the persona of Plaveva, the artist recreate situations and documents “that were and were not” in performances, photography, objects, textiles works, drawings, and typographies. Whereas Ivanoska’s installation reflects on the vulnerabilities of research in the absence of material evidence, her performance presents a case in point: the story behind the political persecution of Plaveva’s daughter, Nadezhda.
List of works:
Document Missing: Performance no. 6 (Action Object), 2022, textile, paint, thread. Dimensions variable.
Document Missing: Performance no. 6 (Daughter), 2022, HD video, duration 25 min, performance at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Skopje, as part of the exhibition “Ecstatic Bodies: Archive of Performance Queer Bodies in Macedonia” curated by Slavcho Dimitrov and Biljana Tanurovska-Kjulavkovski, in the frame of “Skopje Pride Weekend 2022.”
Document Missing: Performance no. 6 (Curses: You Motherfuckers! You Little Pieces of Shit! You Are Scumbags And A Bunch of Cowards!), 2022, wall-engraving, dimensions variable.
Fairy Hair, 2016, group of four woodcarving, graphite and colorless wax on walnut, 30x30x2cm each.
