Back and Forth: The Distance In Between (working title)
- Ivanco Talevski
- Weitzman School of Design (PennDesign)
- Independent Creative Production Grant
The questions and ideas addressed in Ivanco Talevski’s work stem from his experience of living/moving/being in two cities: existing simultaneously between and in both. For the past 20 years, Talevski has been going back and forth between the U.S. and Bitola, Macedonia, where he grew up. In his work, which most often takes the form of prints, drawings, and paintings, he draws from the political and historical landscape of both countries, and their entangled past, present, and future.
Ivanco Talevski will create an artist book and audio works to accompany an upcoming solo exhibition at The Print Center in Philadelphia, tentatively titled Back and Forth: The Distance In Between. The exhibition will feature new prints, photographs, collages, sound works, and installations, representing the spiritual, political and metaphorical journeys through the past, present, and future, contained within the artist’s travels back and forth between Philadelphia and Bitola, Macedonia. The project explores how political circumstances can evoke questions of memory, belonging, borders, history, and their erasure. Many of the works are inspired by an archive of ethnographic drawings by Marko Cepenkov, a turn of the 20th-century collector of oral histories and creator of folkloric notations made during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The artist book and audio works that Talevski has proposed will enable him to explore his relationship with Cepenkov’s work, and particularly how this relationship manifests itself in the exhibition.