The first project for the new-opened gallery of the Soros Center for Contemporary Arts – Skopje, Macedonia [CIX gallery] acts manifesto-like and is announcing the future place where the art in Macedonia will have the opportunity to explore, check, and present it self. The choice of the part from the latest art cycle EX-FYROMISM, or the Constant Desire for Eternity of Zaneta Vangeli has to trace the basic concept of the exhibiting policy of the gallery.

EX-FYROMISM, or the Constant Desire for Eternity presents the work-out of one of the aspects of the social reality in Macedonia after the independence. As a rear appearance in the Macedonian art in the last few years, Vangeli tends to place a certain comment on the actual situation in which the aspects and the consequences of the transition are one of the most provocative. As it was before, Vangeli chooses the most sensitive spots and out of them she makes double or triple significative play in which the signifier and the significant are melting and become referential iconic sites. This kind of iconicness is followed by the permanent discourse between the image and the text. In this discourse the one is transforming into the other and vice versa: the difference is denied, or it becomes unimportant for the text NATO from the model’s clothes (the photography) in relation to the text METADESIGNER which is added afterwards (by computer) on the same photographic sample. Or the text WORLD from the tattoo on the model’s arm versus the added text NOT A RETRO PUNK. This re-signification of the text with the image leads to the equalizing of the code systems in one unique conceptual structure in which the iconicness ensure the narrative direction of the work of art.

From the other hand, this kind of narrativity escapes almost ever present danger to become a story-telling structure consisted by banal and plenty of elements. As it was up to now, very specific for Vangeli, she is keeping the minimum of the needed elements which are bearing and working-out the narrative structure achieving by that high effect of conceptuality which enable the narration through the ‘light’ and seemingly careless play of meanings. Behind the so worked-out triad (iconicness-semanticness-semioticness) Vangeli’s comment stands which, once more, discover the ‘truth’ as a motif for the artist’s interest. This time not as an ‘art truth’, but as ‘social’ one: the NATO motif can not be more actual today, having in mind the events of the outer side of the artist’s world, i.e. this motif represents the only actuality of that world.

Right this and that-like actuality and the way of its artistic transposition separate this cycle as one of the most important one in the last years on the art scene in Macedonia.