Velimir Zernovski: Pietà in the Emergency Blankets

Through the project Pietà in the Emergency Blankets, the Pavilion of North Macedonia creates a contemplative yet critical space to renew our ethical sensibilities for a time of interleaved global crises. The pavilion draws from a canonical motif of sorrow to provide a meditation on vulnerability, displacement, and collective responsibility. It captures the enduring themes of mourning and care at stake in the image of the pietà and reads them through the troubled material and political realities of the present. Who do we carry responsibility for, and who carries us? 

The materiality of the emergency blankets that cover the sculpture provides access to the crises of our time, serving as a tangible reminder of precarious conditions and the urgent need to reimagine solidarity. The shimmer of gold leaf, once associated with the sacred, is now linked to the state of bare life. The work charts an aesthetic shift from the gilded permanence of historical tradition to the provisional shelter of disposable, aluminum-coated plastic film. In doing so, it collapses the boundary between ideals and lived reality. Art has an important role to play in navigating global upheaval—war and state violence, authoritarianism, the exclusion and displacement of peoples, extinction and environmental devastation.

Pietà in the Emergency Blankets also stands in the midst of profound crises within the art world itself. As the 2026 Venice Biennale unfolds, marked by institutional deadlocks, illegitimacy,  withdrawals, and public protests, the pavilion invites viewers into the depths of feeling and reflection on the shocking brutality of our moment. The figural couple anchors our senses in an iconic image of death. But it also leads us into process of reflection on how to uphold the grief for those we have lost. Can we do justice to those we mourn?  What would that entail? When we are struck by the weight of death, do we choose to live differently? Emergency is the catalyst of change. 

Originally created for space missions, emergency blankets are now visual markers of the victims of global conflicts and inequalities. In the sculpture, they connect the viewer with those who are living through urgent conditions, providing a platform for their experiences of exile, lost homes, broken relationships, trauma, and death. Monumentality gives way to precarity, echoing a world in which stability and belonging are increasingly fragile. The golden folds become a limitrophy through which human figures mutate. The emergency blankets embrace the figures, affirming the promise of safety, redemption and new life. The obscured bodies refuse easy legibility, compelling an attentiveness to what is partially hidden, displaced, or yet to emerge. The composition is no longer confined to individual suffering but is suggested across material entanglements. In assessing the present condition through this lens, the project does not prescribe solutions; rather, it provokes sustained reflection on what, and who demands care under conditions of indeterminacy, mutability, and relational becoming across bodies, materials, histories, and environments. 

The sculpture wraps the pietà in gold-colored emergency blankets, reclothing it to generate new meanings. Attention extends away from the figures to our own fragile relations, uncertain futures, and shared conditions of exposure. From beneath the reflecting folds of the blankets, the figures appear and disappear, suggesting a protean transformation. Mourning is not an end point but a generative process that can give rise to new forms of relation and responsibility. The installation transfigures the pietà. It asks what forms of care become possible when agency is redistributed, when matter is acknowledged as lively, and when responsibility arises from entanglement rather than mastery. The corporeality of the sculpture yields alternative trajectories, creating new opportunities for social connection and empathy.

Text: Tihomir Topuzovski and Amanda Boetzkes / Commissioner: Avni Qahili / Artist: Velimir Zernovski / Curators: Tihomir Topuzovski and Amanda Boetzkes / Project holder: Museum of Contemporary Art, Skopje / Supported by: Ministry of Culture and tourism of the Republic of North Macedonia.