Welcome to a guided video tour of Yane Calovski’s exhibition ’Personal Object’, where the director and curator of Kohta, Anders Kreuger, introduces individually six works from the exhibition.

Educated in the US, Japan and the Netherlands, Yane Calovski (North Macedonia, 1973) has been active in the Macedonian capital Skopje since the mid-2000s and is often seen on the international exhibition circuit. He participated in Manifesta 3 in Ljubljana in 2000 and Manifesta 7 in Bolzano in 2008, and he represented Macedonia (as the country was then known) at the Venice Biennale in 2015 together with his partner Hristina Ivanoska. The couple work jointly – most recently presenting three consecutive exhibitions in Vodnjan (Croatia), Zagreb and Skopje in 2017–19 – but also separately, and ‘Personal Object’ is a solo project by Calovski, featuring new and still ongoing pieces as well as material from his own archive.

Drawing is a crucial component of his practice. Yet it is not as if a constant stream of drawings were flowing from his hands, waiting to be skimmed for easy visual displays. Making drawings is, to him, rather what getting houses built is to an architect: a sign of achievement, but also a signal that more is to come and proof of the unbroken connection between thought and image and object and physical environment and lived reality. In fact architecture was part of Calovski’s artistic education and has frequently figured in his work, as solid objects or lofty plans (or the depleted physical remains of both). He has, for instance, done extensive projects around his parents’ self-designed house, the new ‘metabolic’ master plan for Skopje after the 1963 earthquake or Polish post-war architect Oskar Hansen and his ‘principles of open form’.

Read more about the exhibition here.