Duo presentation with Maja Babič Košir

NADA Villa Warsaw 
Villa Gawrońskich, Al. Ujazdowskie 23
Warsaw, Poland

16/05 — 19/05/2024

Curating and exhibition design: Piera Ravnikar
Organisation: RAVNIKAR Gallery
Photographer: Bartosz Gorka

NADA Villa Warsaw brought together a diverse selection of 44 international galleries and art spaces from 25 cities to present artists in a collaborative exhibition format, engaging the distinctive character of Villa Gawrońskich, a neo-baroque architectural landmark located in the heart of Warsaw. Organized with Michał Kaczyński (Raster), Marta Kołakowska (LETO Gallery), and Joanna Witek-Lipka (Warsaw Gallery Weekend), the initiative builds on Raster’s series of Villa Projects, an art fair alternative first initiated in Warsaw in 2006, with iterations held in Iceland, Japan, and Canada.

Over the course of several years of collaboration, artists Nevena Aleksovski and Maja Babič Košir have developed a distinctive artistic expression, which they build through multi-media and in situ spatial interventions. Their latest project, Letters from the South (2024), is an example of a visually rich narrative that interweaves aesthetically related creative practices into a unified wall installation combining drawing, collage, painting, ready-made and sculpture.

In combining diverse media, the artists treat the entire exhibition space as a blank canvas, on which they gradually layer associations and, in a reciprocal dialogue, layer fragments of stories that condition a more complex narrative. The dynamic and seemingly effortless collaging of the works is weighed down by individual and collective memories, commentaries and markers on the past and the present, which the artists share from their position of women, creators and migrants. Both are marked by the experience of emigration and the legacy of the former Yugoslavia, a place that has undergone a radical socio-political transformation in recent decades; the decline of the socialist system, the rise of neoliberalism, accompanied by economic and, last but not least, health crises, widespread insecurity and the radical digitalisation of life. In the context of constantly changing social circumstances, unstable politics and cultural dynamics, the artists today explore questions of belonging and a sense of familiarity in foreign and primary environments, addressing issues of origin and identity. The very motivation of the work and their understanding of their own roles have been fundamentally defined by references to women's struggles and women's positions past and present. In doing so, they adopt a highly engaged stance, aware of the vulnerability of the position paved by their predecessors for today's generation of women. The feminine and sensitive aesthetics that distinguish both artists, behind their apparent fragility, consequently reveal motives of emancipation and determination behind the artists' gestures.

The layering character of the installation, despite the intense interplay of two related aesthetics, allows the artists to maintain a certain degree of fragmentation and singularity, fusing their practices into an inseparable whole. They allow themselves the freedom of close coexistence of two visual expressions, which is the result of several years of exchange of creative processes, mutual understanding, trust and intimate immersion in personal archives and family stories, co-shaped by the socio-political realities of each time. The moment of sisterhood and solidarity developed through their co-creation imbues the work with an unconcealed optimism that inspires them with hope, the search for solutions and freer visions of the future.

                                                                                                                          Pia Miklič