Nada Prlja's North Macedonia Pavilion at Venice Biennale

At the 58th Venice Biennale, the North Macedonia Pavilion features artist Nada Prlja (born 1971 in Sarajevo, lives between Skopje and London) with her project 'Subversion in Red' at Palazzo Rota Ivancich. The pavilion presents a mix of installation, performance, video, and assemblage, engaging with Marxist thought as reinterpreted by Félix Guattari and a new humanism. Central to the exhibition is 'Subtle Subversion,' a discussion held on opening day among artists and intellectuals around a large table, where a moderator annotated key concepts. The show reconstructs the aesthetic-spiritual landscape of Prlja's youth, including videos referencing Yugoslav black wave cinema, fragments of a mural by Borko Lazeski in Skopje, and reinterpretations of works by Olga Jevric, Boris Nikolovski, and Jordan Grabulovski from the Museum of Contemporary Art Skopje. The nostalgia evoked is not for a past Yugoslavia but for a possible future collective society, informed by Deleuze & Guattari's 'capitalism and schizophrenia.' Prlja's work aims at a 'subtle subversion' that infiltrates contemporary times.