Nowhere Somewhere

The 20 photographs that I am presenting here, are part of the project Nowhere Somewhere, which was presented in solo exhibition in the Museum of the city Skopje, North Macedonia

"Nowhere Somewhere" by Vanja Dimitrova is a solo exhibition encompassing several stages of her long-standing work in the fields of artistic film, audiovisual art, and photography. The manipulation of cross-media reveals her experimental nature, the potential for transforming aesthetic variations, and the author's perspective that frames different stories (real or fictional), real locations in various countries, imaginary worlds and constructed settings.

Her subtle and insightful perception focuses on the intuitive approach to narratives, subjects or landscapes that exist on their own, revealing (sur)real, magical states/situations whose truth is (re)discovered later. The focus of the artistic interest is the image as a representation, as a visual imprint of the sought-after reality expressed through the filmic expression in photography, film as a documentary or constructed narrative, a found, seen, assembled impression of living. The visual in these works is a journey through time or times, through space or spaces whose coincidence is perhaps somewhere or nowhere.

The project encompasses questions about identity in the global social and cultural climate. The significance of this exhibition is based on the transformative power of art, driven by the search for individual existence, the struggle for survival in the present, and the technological acceleration of today which aims to eliminate basic human discernment. The framed views contain compositional harmony, a balance of the "full" and the "empty," the dynamics of the elements in the scenes, showing the inseparable unity of man and nature and the joint effort for survival in captured time filled with "silent" alienation and loneliness.

Dimitrova's perspective stems from a cinematic way of perceiving reality, serially capturing and contemplating the representation of a scene – developed with narrative visualization, not as a single or isolated view. The depiction of the action contains visual cues from a scene and subsequently multiple frames from that scene, pointing to the impression – a " deconstructed film book" through which cycles of a "presence of reciprocity" of the filmed subject and/or nature and the author/camera subject are followed. However, despite the actual presence and simultaneity of the filming process, the portrayed characters are entirely removed from the determination of spatiotemporal coordinates and determinants. The photographic depiction is just one sequenced form of the dialogue that develops between the observed (object) and the observer, between continuous movement and the static eye behind the camera. The photographic cycles represent a living "somewhere," and the intentional untitled nature conceptually supports the logic of the possible "nowhere," emphasizing the unrecognizable time, place and story.

Natalija Rajchinovska-Pavleska

Curator