Suzana Milevska at Summer School as School 2022
August 16, 2022, 20:00
Venue: Boxing Club

Is "Sorry" Enough? - Art of Apology, Apology as Art
Discussant: Uresa Ahmeti

In this lecture Suzana Milevska will ponder and extrapolate the potentialities, limitations, and pitfalls of various protocols of apology, and the reciprocal relations between apology and art in various artistic practices that aim towards social transformation, conciliation, and reconciliation. The presentation will address the personal narratives and institutionalized apologetic discourses lacing the memories of contested names, places, and bodies. Milevska argues that apology is a kind of bridge between the past and future that emphasizes the urgency to asks the following pertinent questions: What are the socio-political systems, juridical structures, and protocols that either form an indispensable precondition for any successful apology, or lead to failed apologies? How could one prevent or overcome the futile efforts of apology? And what should come after an apology? Milevska will particularly focus on performative and participatory art strategies as well as on concrete artistic research methods that artists deploy in order to activate individual and collective apologies and thus to disentangle the concrete ethical, socio-political and aesthetical protocols of internalized traumatic memories, collective and public forgetting, postmemory, and empathy. For example, the artworks of the artists calling institutions for removal or renaming certain objects, streets, and natural or public spaces sometimes result with legal remedies for healing the “wounds from the past” (S. Huber).

The lecture stems from Milevska’s long-term cross-disciplinary research project Ethical and Aesthetical Protocols of Apology developed during the Research Fellowship at the Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen in Innsbruck. The first project’s phase was presented at the exhibition Corporeality, Repair, Conciliation, in the Neue Galerie in Innsbruck (May-July 2022). Apologoscapes - Not yet an exhibition, was rather a spatialized essay: a kind of rhizomatic hypertext that Milevska weaves through a laborious accumulation of cross-references of various research materials such as texts, images, and sounds of or about apology.

Suzana Milevska, Ph.D., is a curator and theorist of art and visual culture, based in Skopje, North Macedonia. Her theoretical research projects employ postcolonial and feminist institutional critique of representational regimes of hegemonic power in arts and visual culture. She is interested in the deconstruction and decolonization of contentious cultural heritages in art institutions, collections, and public spaces. Her curatorial projects focus on collaborative and participatory art practices, feminist projects by women artists looking at visual microhistories in state and family photographic archives, and community-based projects in solidarity with marginalized and disenfranchised communities. In 2021-22 Milevska participated the Fellowship Program for Art and Theory at the Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen in Innsbruck and developed her research project Ethical and Aesthetical Protocols of Apology that was exhibited at the Neue Galerie – Innsbruck under the title Apologoscapes – Not yet an exhibition. In 2019, Milevska curated the exhibition Contentious Objects/Ashamed Subjects at the Polytechnic University Milan as Principal Investigator of TRACES – Transmitting of Contentious Cultural Heritages with the Arts – From Intervention to Co-production (EU Programme Horizon 2020, 2016-2019). From 2013 to 2015, she was Endowed Professor of Central and South Eastern European Art Histories, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Milevska was a Fulbright Senior Research Scholar (Library of Congress, Washington D.C.). She holds a PhD in Visual Cultures from Goldsmiths College London. In 2012, she won the Igor Zabel Award for Culture and Theory.

Milevska’s publications include Gender Difference in the Balkans (VDM Verlag, 2010) and the readers The Renaming Machine: The Book (P.A.R.A.SI.T.E. Institute, 2010), On Productive Shame, Reconciliation, and Agency (SternbergPress, 2016), and Inside Out – Critical Discourses concerning Institutions (co-edited with Alenka Gregorič, 2016).

Uresa Ahmeti finished her high school studies at United World College Maastricht in the Netherlands, after she won a national scholarship, and is currently in her last year of studying both Sociology and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Wesleyan University, CT, USA. Writing is one of her specialties. As a writer, activist, and conceptual performance artist, she has always seen art and activism as inextricable from one another. From shouting slam poetry in anti-deportation protests in the Netherlands to performing original pieces in the FemART festival in South-Eastern Europe, this combination of art and activism has shaped the course of her life. Interrogating, shifting, and expanding social binaries is her passion. Her work addresses and challenges capitalist, hetero-normative and patriarchal social structures. Her performances “From ‘other’ to Self’” and “Interrogating Power” as well as the podcasts she’s produced, and her recently published poetry book “How the Hell Do I Abort a Demon” among other works, call for self-agency, situated knowledge production from the self, social awareness, recognition and opposition of the ways in which systems of oppression co-exist and subjugate bodies. In turn, she calls for the abolition of these systems altogether through queering norms, binaries, and ways of carrying oneself through the world.