Axiotomic + IXgram Dorian Jovanovic and Stefan Shashkov – BATHING

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As the last project for 2023, we announce the multimedia presentation of the authors Dorian Jovanovic and Stefan Shashkov entitled “Bathing”. This video and sound installation will be installed in the object Chifte Hamam on December 27, 2023, from 8 p.m., until January 7, 2024.

The bathhouse, i.e. its function at the given time, was a public space where the body was purified, but also the exchange of information from the daily life of the bazaar.

With this project, in a symbolic way, we continue the tradition of the hammam, as a place for purification, adding a new dimension, which is the purification of perception with light and audio-visual “cosmetic” means.

The light-visual part contains videos and sound projected on the walls, while visitors with their shadows will give an unpredictable dynamic to the entire visual space, which cannot be repeated in any case. The constant visual variability is associated with transience, which in such objects with a specific purpose, are places where people relax and perhaps get a small chance to perceive transience.

Biographies

Axiotomic is a solo project of the musician and producer Dorian Jovanović, also known for long-term collaborations with the groups String Forces, Čalgia Sound System, Zdeev, Kaldrma, Grendeni, Seth (today Setstat) and Dobrila&Dorian Duo. Axiotomic’s music is improvisational at its core, created live on the spot (performance), but within specific, predetermined frames and/or directions that move the body of sound in a specific direction during the performance itself. In terms of sound, the performances are electronic and ambient, often based on microscopic noises of various sources and character, but the basis of Axiotomik’s sound is the Chapman Stick, a 12-string instrument from the group of tapping instruments. Axiotomic is also the author of video-materials that are closely correlated with music and whose purpose is to expand the sound in the visual domain for a more comprehensive experience of the listener/viewer. Releases: EP “Shape Form Ornament” and album “The Emergence of Symbols”, released for the publishing house “Profundus” from Skopje.

Stefan Shashkov (IXgram), born in Skopje, survived exactly 195 days after the earthquake. In 1991, he graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy, Department of History of Art with Archeology at Cyril and Methodius University. After his senior year, he embarks on a journey through the great globe that, thanks to the Creator, is still spinning.
He started his adventure through art at the end of the last century and, as such, he is still pushing it through time and space. With the Archimediala group, as its member, at the BOX WITH PICTURES exhibition, they received a special award from the jury composed of some well-known faces from the world and domestic art criticism and essay writing.
But he has received the most awards for his video film work, namely the film PRAYER (winner of the Grand Prix at the Balkan television film festival Great Krusevska Koria) shot across ¾ of the globe, COLORS IN TIME (special prize of the jury at the second AsterFest) documentary film about the Macedonian painter Milos Kodzoman, as well as the short 5-minute video for the music track “Soul of the man” worked together with Aleksandar Stankoski, performed by Gish and Hare (Bankrupt Blues Band). The production time of the video coincided with the open competition of the Goethe Institute in Skopje, on the occasion of Wim Wenders’s 67th or so birthday, and he won second prize.

Speaking of some famous world figures from the fields and fields of artistic creation, it is worth noting that photographs and computer graphics by this author are in the possession of Lori Anderson, Brian Eno and Roger Eno. With the last one, during his concert at the Macedonian Philharmonic, an exhibition of digital prints was set up and the catalog/book LIGHTER THAN NO LIGHT was promoted. It contains works inspired by the music of these authors as well as several others. But the first collaboration with them was during the lockdown at the very beginning of 2021, when they curated an outdoor video presentation in Los Angeles titled QUIET MOMENTS. Out of about 2000 videos received at the call, about 70 were selected. The project started on his birthday, which with his participation in this event he accepted as a gift to “powers” beyond his understanding.

In 2017, he leaves the urban stench and moves to the Iron Fortress, where he stays until 2021 and is reborn. I consider this one of the most extreme moves and one of the few most realistic projects in his artistic activity, because as Dali says, I don’t use drugs. I’m a drug. He would add: I am not an artist, my life is art.

In 2019, at the invitation of maestro Kiro Urdin, he flies to Nairobi, Kenya and from there another 7 hours by jeep to the village of the people he wanted to see, meet, record…the Maasai. Well, he only exhibited the photos from there (taken with a small Laika pocket camera and an iPhone 5) in the cultural center in the Iron Fortress, and it is one of his favorite exhibitions. Not that he didn’t exhibit twice in the Big Apple independently and in the city of gondolas, but that’s nothing to brag about….

Among other things, he has realized several exhibitions and a bunch of unrealized ones that have a great specific weight for the author’s already spondylosis spine.

Curator, Gorancho Gjorgjievski

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