Spotlight with Suzana Milevska
Suzana Milevska, Independent Curator, Skopje, North Macedonia
Could you tell us a little more about your background and how you got into curating?
My path into curating evolved slowly and unpredictably. After earning my BA in Art History in 1984 at SS. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje, North Macedonia (then still part of the former Yugoslavia), I experienced a long professional hiatus. For thirteen years, I was unable to secure a position within any institution. During that time, I devoted myself to reading, traveling, and visiting museums and exhibitions, mostly throughout the Balkans. During this period, the concept of freelance curating was virtually unknown in my home country.
There were rare open calls, and I applied for jobs at almost every art and cultural institution, but without success. Positions for curators or educators were often reserved for relatives or close acquaintances of those already employed, or for individuals with political connections, none of which I had. The only professional path available to me was the low-paid and uncertain freelance art criticism. That is how I began writing and publishing art reviews in local and international newspapers and art journals during the late 1980s.
Fortunately, very early in my career, I began traveling and attending major international exhibitions and biennials such as the Venice and Istanbul Biennials. Through these experiences, I met colleagues who helped me navigate the obstacles I faced at home. It may seem counterintuitive now, but my earliest curated exhibitions, in the early 1990s, took place not in Skopje but in Istanbul, Stockholm, and Berlin. I am deeply grateful to the late Turkish artist and educator Tomur Atagök and to Swedish curator Maria Lind, among others, who trusted me and supported my first international projects at a time when I had neither sufficient curatorial experience nor local support.
From the outset, I encountered a peculiar linguistic obstacle: the term curating itself was problematic in my native language. The first syllable of the word curator (“cur”) is identical in sound to a vulgar term for the male genitalia. As a result, I faced discomfort and even ridicule when applying for funding or signing my name as a curator. So much for the often-quoted, recuperative etymology of the term (from the Latin “curare”). This unfortunate homonym added another layer of difficulty in my curatorial “instituting” within an already patriarchal and sexist environment. Yet, paradoxically, it pushed me towards defining my practice explicitly as feminist from the very beginning of my curatorial journey.
Who/what has influenced your curatorial practice?
Although my academic background in art history was rather traditional and lacked a theoretical component, this limitation, or perhaps precisely because of it, propelled me toward theory. My early exhibitions were shaped by poststructuralist, postcolonial, and feminist thinkers. Some of my exhibitions were even titled after texts or books by Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, J. L. Austin, Edward Said, Homi K. Bhabha, Arjun Appadurai, Judith Butler, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.
Over time, I shifted from criticism to curating projects that addressed these concerns directly, such as Liquor Amnii, Desiring Machines, Little Big Stories, Always Already Apocalypse, The First Peep-Show in the City, and Capital and Gender.
In my early writing, I critiqued the dominance of abstract modernism on the regional art scene, a mode of art that, while ostensibly apolitical, was paradoxically embraced by the prevailing ideology because it maintained a comfortable distance from reality. As I continued curating, my work became increasingly informed by the socio-political turmoil in the region: the wars, the dissolution of Yugoslavia, the transition from socialism back to capitalism, the rampant developments of neoliberalism, and the changing dynamics of gender relations all had a direct impact. These conditions profoundly influenced both the artists I collaborated with and my community-oriented projects since the mid-1990s.
The role of the curator is continuously changing. Could you describe what it means to be a curator today?
My curatorial approach has evolved into what I recently termed kalokagathian curating, an autotheoretical matrix inspired by the ancient Greek ideal of kalokagathia, which calls for unity of the good and the beautiful, or ethics and aesthetics. I believe that curating today must reconcile and intertwine these two dimensions, especially in response to the growing hierarchies and contradictions at the centre of the contemporary art world.
I have long criticised institutions that prioritise entertainment and spectacle while ignoring, or even perpetuating, social and economic inequalities, gender discrimination, and ecological or geopolitical violence. In the struggle for social transformation, curating that fosters participation and accessibility for disenfranchised communities positions the curator as a cross-ethnic ally and “cross-racial ally” (Kenneth V. Hardy, 2021), along with similar efforts by socially engaged artists and activists. This was partly the reason that motivated me to curate several projects with Roma artists or to include them in other shows, for example Call the Witness (2010–2011), Roma Protocols (2011), To One’s Name (2013), and Rewriting the Protocols: Naming, Renaming and Profiling (online exhibition).
Of course, I am fully aware that contradictions within the art world are inherent, given its bourgeois origins. Many socially engaged projects risk becoming “infelicitous speech acts,” to borrow from J. L. Austin, despite their good intentions. I have written extensively about how neoliberal conditions often thwart the emancipatory aims of participatory art and hinder its effects (see: Infelicitous Participatory Acts on the Neoliberal Stage).
Another concept that resonates with me is becoming-curator, derived from G. Deleuze and F. Guattari’s notions of “becoming-woman” and “becoming-minor” (see Suzana Milevska, 2013, “Becoming-Curator,” in The Curatorial: A Philosophy of Curating, edited by Jean-Paul Martinon, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013, pp. 65–73). It does not refer to a professional trajectory, but rather to the political and ethical positioning of women curators today. “Becoming-curator” involves two movements: first, an isolation from the dominant majority that enables the emergence of curatorial potentiality; and second, a distancing from the minority position, through which the woman curator self-identifies with her gender and asserts agency as a political curatorial subject, through feminist struggles and solidarity.
Tell us about the latest project?
My most recent large-scale project is the book Participatory Art: A Paradigm Shift from Objects to Subjects (2024), a collection of fifteen essays on participatory art written and published in English over more than fifteen years. For the first time, these essays appear together in one volume, and, in another volume, translated by Ana Dimishkovska into my native Macedonian language. Both books were published by Kontrapunkt and its editor-in-chief, Iskra Geshoska.
Since my first essay on participatory art in 2006, I have been deeply engaged in examining this shift from art objects to participatory processes, an evolution that redefines the roles of artists, institutions, and audiences. The book explores how participatory art reconfigures power relations, moving towards equality and collaboration. My working-class, socialist upbringing and subsequent experiences in a postsocialist reality, as well as my investment in participatory and deliberative democracy, have all shaped my approach.
The essays draw inspiration from philosophers, theorists, and curators such as Giorgio Agamben, J. L. Austin, Nicolas Bourriaud, Guy Debord, Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, Dewey, Nancy, Rancière, Simondon, Spivak, Bishop, Groys, Lind, Martinon, Rogoff, Raunig, and Sholette, among others. The volume also reflects, directly or indirectly, the influence of artists such as David Medalla, Tadej Pogačar, Tanja Ostojić, Tal Adler, Azra Akšamija, Martin Krenn/Aisling O’Birn, Sasha Huber, Merete Røstad, and Alfred Ullrich, whose practices embody diverse participatory strategies.
The book is structured into four chapters: History and Theory of Participatory Art as a Means for Democratisation and Social Change; Representation, Participation, Solidarity; Feminist Research, Performativity, and Transindividuality in Participatory Art; and Reversible Recuperation and Accessibility. These sections situate participatory art within broader debates about institutional critique, feminist and decolonial practices, and “reverse recuperation,” an umbrella term I proposed for the artistic projects that deal with various models for redistribution of cultural capital. Instead of a conventional conclusion, the book closes with my 2020 essay The Return to Kalokagathia: Curating as Leverage in the Ongoing Dialogues between Aesthetics and Ethics.
As for upcoming projects, I am currently revisiting my 2008–2011 project, The Renaming Machine. The return of "the renaming machine" in the recent years invites a re-examination of the social and political mechanisms that drive multiple processes of renaming. I believe, the mechanisms and strategies of renaming have changed radically in the recent years, and transcended conventional political binaries and blurred the either/or divisions. I am interested in how art and artistic research continued to illuminate these transformations.
What are you reading, watching, or listening to now, that is helping you to stay relaxed and positive?
The only time I truly relax is when I am offline and away from the news. I am easily disturbed by global events and by the often unethical use of horrific images depicting tragedy, as I am a deeply emotional and empathetic person. Thus, my rare positive moments come during the short, low-key drives with my partner, in the vicinity of Skopje. Nothing special. They are simple, screen-free excursions that feel like a kind of digital detox: no internet, no social networks, and no phone calls are allowed. Sašo, my partner of more than 25 years, is just driving us around, and we stop for some short walks, nice views, and foraging. At home, I occasionally watch television, often revisiting old shows I missed in my youth. For nearly two decades, I avoided TV altogether, as I was more drawn to countercultural movements than to mainstream entertainment and popular culture. In the current climate, however, these rediscoveries provide a quiet pleasure and a sense of distance from the unbearable and relentless horrors of current events.
How long have you been part of IKT and how do you feel that it has benefited your curatorial practice?
I first learned about IKT in Istanbul in 1997, from none other than Harald Szeemann himself. He encouraged me to apply, though I was still quite young and relatively inexperienced internationally. It was not until 2005 that I felt ready to join, and the first IKT Congress I attended was in Paris in 2006. That experience was transformative. The intense programme introduced me to numerous art venues and fellow curators, many of whom I have continued to collaborate with over the past two decades. Most importantly, it offered a platform to share my curatorial ideas and projects with peers who might otherwise never have encountered them. This exchange of knowledge and inspiration continues to sustain my involvement in IKT to this day.
Thank you Suzana!
Learn more about Suzana and her work on her website. Follow Suzana on Instagram / Facebook.
Spotlight
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