Shadows by Stojan Pavleski

Reception for the Artist on Tuesday, June 17th from 6 to 8 pm: The project Shadows (2025) is conceived in three correlated units: the series of photographs entitled It is a plastic, baby! (2024/25), the video Stalker (2022), and appropriated drawings (from the mid-60s) published in the first weekly magazine in Macedonia —Young Fighter [Млад Борец], authored works by the artist’s father, Vlado Pavleski (b. 1948).

Shadows (2025)

The Shadows project, conceptualized as a collage installation, illustrates the former glorifications of the ideological meaning of warfare, in contrast to the current senseless exploits in the name of the new order, dislodging man from the time he lives in. Locating the Stalker and his confrontation with the banality of expectations, the concept asks, what is the meaning of human positioning in the apocalyptic scenarios of today? Witnessing living through the industrial-plastic era, trade wars, and the accumulation of capital, the project addresses the question of human survival, left to one’s own instincts, and perhaps, forced into paramilitary survival.

The fragmented photographs with war scenes as friezes from the new pantheons of power and the drawings from the post-war period made by my father collide in the concept of the Stalker—ultimately faced with the pseudo-potency of the time he lives in. The appropriated drawings are critical resuscitations with a recontextualized message in a time when symbolism is consumed faster than it is understood. Their correlation with the plastic toy soldiers and the lone Stalker raises the question: What lingers on the periphery of the collective consciousness, and do these ghosts of resistance cast their shadows across generations?

Stojan Pavleski

The Worn-out Cloaks of The Revolution

The project Shadows (2025) is conceived in three correlated units: the series of photographs entitled It is a plastic, baby! (2024/25), the video Stalker (2022), and appropriated drawings (from the mid-60s) published in the first weekly magazine in Macedonia —Young Fighter [Млад Борец], authored works by the artist’s father, Vlado Pavleski (b. 1948).

The iconographies of the post-war period (the drawings), together with the plasticized phenomenon of warfare (the photographs)—both points of ideological commodification—diachronically collide with the contemporary concept of the Stalker, situated in a surreal and associative-apocalyptic scenario. If we follow the chronological fátum of the project’s layout, the appropriated drawings as some kind of mark from the author’s childhood seem to be the mainstay of the concept Shadows. As a fragment of the author’s personal memory of the time of great ideologies and even the meaning of the artistic reflection of a social time, they now manifest as apparitions of transgenerational and already worn-out ideological resistance. Referring to the plasticized and militarized imagination of today, to trade wars, and to the unstoppable accumulation of capital, we can ask ourselves, does the artist perhaps want to emphasize to us that by looking with ‘eyes wide shut,’ the West may have lost the plastic revolution from the East?

Made according to a quasi-filmographic script, the video installation Stalker addresses the issue of the new militarism, articulated through the “techniques of danger” (Mann 143) through which man searches and moves in a real but also fictional universe—a “Zone” of wandering. The Stalker illustrates the experience that lies behind the concepts of human existence—physical and spiritual—an action in which the saving agenda is absent. A subtle, quite short, but boldly announced sequence at the end of the video Stalker opens the narrative to possible readings of man’s insubstantial wandering. In fact, here the questions are confronted: what is need and what is desire, what dislodges and what ejaculates man from the perverted reality of today? Is there a place in the narrative about resistance? This question remains quite open, because converging from one strategy to another of what has been called a military revolution—technological, tactical, strategic, and conceptual at the same time (Adam Smith)—the ‘stalker’ is confronted not only with physical but also with spiritual existence. This is so because, regardless of the degree of industrialization of societies, man becomes an insatiable consumer, or homo consumens, a voracious man, and the very ‘thing,’ an ‘article’ of materialistic culture (Fromm 1965), participating in the perversion of the reality he wants to live, and thus in the process of dehumanization that defines him as a commodity.

The visual structure of the concept/photo installation It is plastic, baby! encompasses various scenes of warfare (invasion, attack, defense), but it does not aim at recognizing the actions in a specific historically known and enacted context but rather points to the continuously growing techno-capitalist order of societies. It is the “system” that is “dominated by a monopoly that—like a vampire—sucks the blood from the world” (Amin 2018). Ichnographically, the photographic depictions register fragments of mass military ‘scenes’ resembling the heroic friezes of socialist realist monuments from the post-war period. They are iconographies of produced, but not ideological heroism. They are remnants of the efforts of contemporary culture and its derivatives in a technological society. 

Addressing the periphery of the major centers and the current wars, the engaged response to this concept may lie in the perception of the relapses of a delayed strategy from the political agreements of the Non-Aligned Movement and the remaining blocs in the multipolar global model. The context of Vlado Pavleski’s drawings published in the weekly magazine—Young Fighter [Млад Борец] of the National Liberation Youth Union of Macedonia (NOMSM)—is in line with the struggle for liberation from fascist occupation slavery (NOB) for the liberation of national and youth ideals in a free Macedonia in a federal democratic Yugoslavia. Their appropriation in the Shadows project is conceived as a contextual parallelism—the warfare in the name of ideologies and their systems (communist, socialist, national) and the current crisis of movements (multiple movements), i.e., the meaninglessness of warfare—as hopeless for humanity. The temporal dialogue through the process of appropriation encompasses recurring references passed down from generation to generation (father-son), reflecting on the phenomenon of warfare, not as a completed, but as a postponed action. In an artistic sense, the appropriation of the post-war artistic reflection in this project also rounds out the critical illustration of the quasi-monumentality of contemporary (engaged) art, which in the name of “revolutions” circulates as in the etymological construction but does not make a particular “astronomical turn” speaking in the name of art. As a continuation of an authorial preoccupation, Deaf Room (2022), a project that anticipated the replacement of the audience with technologically intelligent machines, Shadows of the Common (2023), a project with a diagnostic perspective for the metastatic illness of society generated by various systemic malformations in continuity, this project also locates the acute points of the techno-capitalist invasion, but not in a post-form (as a register) but in an anticipatory one (as an inevitability), bringing them to the level of recognizing the massification and quantification of the profit from the exploitation of man. 

All this leads to real, not imaginary, theoretical, or cognitive dehumanization. The warfare induced by neocolonialism, territorial imperialism, and “geopolitical militarism” in the name of economic profit is a kind of legitimate violence by and over humanity, or as the American sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein describes it, man is hostage to the “modern world system,” the “world economy,” and the “capitalist system that has taken root and consolidated itself as a defining feature of the system.” Hence, “war as a general phenomenon” in the name of “international financial capital,” which “is becoming stronger than nation states,” is “driven by a system that gives priority to the endless accumulation of capital” (Volerstein 46). Human potential as a means of warfare is inevitably part of the so-called “global commodity chain—GCC” (Starosta 2010), living in the era of the plastic revolution that comes with the mega-projects of the capitalist order. After the “negotiated globalization,” the production evolution that followed the phases of industrialism has been replaced by the discoveries of cheap commodities, toys, and international toyification. It is undoubtedly a revolution without any strategy for civilizational or liberal gains.

Hence, the Shadows project essentially asks: what is revolutionary and what is counter-revolutionary in today’s time? Industrial revolutions, technological ones, resulted in the use of inventions for militaristic purposes, they went beyond ‘in the service’ of humanity. What revolutionizes our society does not mean progress, but living in the plastic age, where man is not a user but a surplus value, which is only used in the field, as in the Old Testament theme (Abraham’s), but in which there is no pardon when humanity is placed on the altar of obedience. In the historical continuity of revolutions with a capital R—the French, the October, the Chinese— the famous slogan “liberty, equality, fraternity” today cannot be used as a password to approach and subvert the system from within, where man will be the decisive factor in the struggle for democracy and liberalism. It does not exist ‘from within’, because industrial capitalism is transnational (Mann, 1992). The author also addressed this issue in one of his previous works, Blue Blood, Blue Revolution, where he anticipated the idea of ​​‘acting from within’ the monarchies vis-à-vis the failure of the ‘red’ (the slogan of the revolution, leftist ideologies, socialism, communism, anarchism and the labor movement). But this time, and in this project, it is not about monarchies and their monopolistic power, but about oligopolies (Volerstin 49) that manage the market of values ​​and goods, into which man also enters as mass production of military capital, the military industry. And the root of the very term ‘revolution’ from the neo-Latin revolutio which means “turning” and “circular movement” in an astronomical sense (Copernicus); after the French bourgeois revolution it took on a meaning according to which it was believed that “the world will no longer be what it was before” (in the liberal sense) (Котовчевски 2007). The imperatives are not towards the expansion of national borders but towards the expansion of the power of influence and the dependence of international capital on that influence. Thus, Shadows may allude to the end of the next great war, in which there will be no conquered territories in a geopolitical sense (colonialism), but rather territorialization of humanity on a global scale.

Text by Natali Rajchinovska-Pavleska

Bibliography

Amin, Samir, interview by Jipson John. 2018. Globalisation and Its Alternative: An Interview with Samir Amin. Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research (October 29).

Fromm, Erich. 1965. “Introduction.” In Socialist Humanism: An International Symposium, by Erich Fromm, VII-XII. New York: Doubleday.

Mann, Michael. 1992. States, War and Capitalism. Oxford: Blackwell.

Starosta, Guido. 2010. “Global Commodity Chains and the Marxian Law of Value.” Antipode 42 (2): 433–465.

Volerstin, Imanuel. 2005. Uvod u Analizu Svetskog Sistema. Translated by Nikola Nikolaidis. Cetinje: OKF.

Котовчевски, Митко. 2007. „Современи теории за револуциите.“ Годишен зборник на Филозофскиот факултет 60, 459–488.

Biography

Stojan Pavleski is born in 1976 in Skopje. He graduated from the Faculty of Architecture and the Faculty of Fine Arts and received his master’s degree from the Faculty of Architecture and the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University “Ss. Cyril and Methodius” in Skopje. He is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Art and Design at the “European University,” Skopje. With a creative career spanning over 25 years as an author in architecture and later as an author in fine arts, he has held solo exhibitions and participated in group art exhibitions in several exhibition contexts and institutions. He is the author and curator of the project “No Man’s Land” (2016), a representative at the 15th Venice Biennale of Architecture, stage director of an art project/performance presented at the European Nomadic Biennial, Manifesta 14, Pristina (2022), and winner of several international competition projects in the field of visual solutions and architecture.

Selected art and architectural exhibitions and competition entries:

• 7th Biennial of Young Artists, Museum of Contemporary Art – Skopje (MoCA), 2005
• 6th International Student Art Biennial, Museum of the City of Skopje, 2005
• Exhibition within the framework of the event “White Night,” Museum of the City of Skopje, 2005
• Group exhibition of selected works, FLU, Chifte Amam, National Gallery, Skopje, 2006
• 16th Biennial of Macedonian Architecture – BIMAS, Museum of the City of Skopje, 2012
• First prize competition solution for the Telecommunication Tower in Skopje, 2013
• First prize competition solution for the Universal Hall and Congress Center in Skopje, 2014
• Group exhibition ByTheWay365, Gallery AZ (Atelje Žitnjak), Zagreb, 2016
• 15th Venice Biennale of Architecture (Arsenale, Venice), 2016
• “No Man’s Land,” Museum of Contemporary Art – Skopje (MoCA), 2017
• Group exhibition ByTheWay – Limited Liability Company, City Library Goce Delchev, National Theater – Gevgelija, 2017
• Group exhibition ByTheWay – Limited Liability Company, Gallery FLU – Skopje, 2018
• 4th Balkan Architectural Biennale – BAB, Cinema Balkan, Belgrade, Serbia, 2019
• Solo exhibition “Deaf Room,” Chifte Amam, National Gallery, Skopje, 2021
• 17th edition, “White Night” event, Chifte Amam, National Gallery, Skopje, September 25, 2021
• European Days of Cultural Heritage, Inclusive Heritage, National Gallery, Skopje, September 22-28, 2021
• Participation in the International exhibition – Concept Neom, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, 2022
• Solo exhibition “Shadows of the Common,” Park of the Faculty of Architecture, Skopje, 2022
• Collaborator (stage director) of the international exhibition by Velimir Žernovski, “Confutatis – what are heroes made of?”, Manifesta 14, European Nomadic Biennial, Pristina, 2022