Stojan Pavleski: Shadows

Shadows (2025) by Stojan Pavleski
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?

“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?” (Natali Rajchinovska-Pavleska, The Worn-out Cloaks of The Revolution, 2025).

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.