Exhibition “Transformations – Flusso – Flux: 1998–2025” by Ljupka Deleva

After decades of living and working in Venice, the Macedonian artist Ljupka Deleva presents her latest project, “Transformations – Flusso – Flux: 1998–2025”, which carries both retrospective and critical dimensions.

The exhibition functions as a multimedia archive of her artistic oeuvre, encompassing photography, video, performative actions, watercolors, drawings, interventions, and other visual experiments. Notably, a significant portion of these works are being shown for the first time to a domestic audience, providing space for a complex visual and conceptual analysis of transformations within her artistic practice.
The project explores the transformation of identity through the lenses of transnationalism, hybridity, and post-migratory subjectivity. Identity is articulated as a process of continual construction and reconfiguration, where the act of acquiring a new citizenship functions as an institutionalized intervention affecting the subject’s self-perception—a symbolic “new layer” structuring the dynamics of belonging and non-belonging.
Deleva investigates the dual position of the contemporary migrant subject, simultaneously an emigrant (leaving one’s homeland) and an immigrant (adapting to a new cultural environment). This dichotomy serves as a critical axis for examining postmodern and postcolonial subjectivity, drawing on Homi Bhabha’s concepts of in-between space and cultural hybridity, as well as Stuart Hall’s understanding of cultural identity as a constantly evolving process.
The project frames migration not merely as geographical movement but as an ontological and aesthetic condition, where identity is in constant flux across cultures, social roles, and gendered positions. The tension between “origin” and “new environment” resonates with theoretical discussions on diasporic identity (Safran 1991; Clifford 1994), exploring the ambivalence of belonging and the productive potential of cultural hybridity.
Beyond the transnational dimension, the project also examines gendered and social aspects of identity, particularly the tensions among the roles of citizen, mother, and artist, and their interaction within a postmodern and postcolonial framework of hybrid identity. The exhibition thus engages in a critical reflection on oppositions, continuous reconfiguration of subjectivity, and the visual articulation of personal and collective processes of identification.
In this sense, “Transformations – Flusso – Flux: 1998–2025” articulates the universal condition of the contemporary migrant subject: fluid, hybrid, contextually constructed, and always undergoing critical and aesthetic reinterpretation, positioned within the interstitial space between cultures, nations, and social roles.
The curator of the project is Dr. Ana Frangovska.