Movement Research (NY) and Lokomotiva (MK) have been developing a long-term collaboration that gathers performance and body-based artists, theorists, and researchers from USA and the Balkans who engage deeply with issues of queerness in their work. They met in Skopje in June 2022 in the context of the Skopje Pride Weekend and Queer Arts festival, and this year their meeting in New York coincided with NYC Pride Weekend.
Artists in residence: zavé martohardjono (USA), Mahx Capacity (USA), Olja Grubić (SLO), Aleksandar Georgiev (MK)
Curators in residence: Levi Gonzalez (USA) and Slavco Dimitrov (MK)
During their time in New York City artists attended multiple events, parties, rallies, marches and performances, and met many different actors from the queer, artistic and activist scene. The artists also visited various historically queer sites in the city, and continuously engaged in dialogue with one another which culminated in a shared studio session that laid the seeds for potential future artistic collaborations. Artists were also able to experience multiple contexts for queer representation and visibility, as well as its complicated relationship to the US market economy and to the diversity (or lack thereof) of historical and contemporary queer populations. In consultation with the non-profit NYC organization Queer|Art, artists and curators from the Balkans gave an informal presentation of their work and working context to an invited group of artists and arts producers in NYC, followed by an informal conversation centered around issues, challenges and joys of queer representation in the arts, and how that shifts in different cultural and geographic contexts.
This collaboration is supported by TMU (Trust for Mutual Understanding).
