Past Exhibitions

About the exhibition

The multimedia project of Zoran Naskovski Black, Red and White is based on blues sound recordings and original interpretations by Black Americans, cotton pickers and convicts, following its transformation from boogie-woogie, rock and roll, down to rap music. Objects used for this project are a plexiglass box containing a branch of cotton, a red sofa, gramophone, vinyl records and compact discs, a photograph depicting a club ambiance featuring portraits of singers. These elements aim to represent the genesis of the blues which can be traced from the first sound recordings of Delta blues, to the modern high-tech sound industry. The procedure of dealing with the subject, reflected in the artists work, introduces the spectator with complex problems of social and economic relations of twentieth century American society.

Zoran Naskovski employs subtle visual and sound elements in this installation. By the use of color (black, red and white), old and new (gramophone, vinyl records and compact discs), environment (home and club), object and tone (setting and sound), document (a photograph of a blues club in the south of the USA), he explores the position of the Black American in an environment imposed on him.

From the standpoint of an analyst of this kind of issue, the artist, himself being a consumer of available artifacts, insists on the reconstruction of existing dissonant codes. On the one hand there is poverty, misery and hardship of life of cotton pickers, convicts, enslaved black immigrants, juxtaposed by a highly industrialized environment and consumers of their work and their native culture. It is exactly through the authentic musical expression - the blues, that the artist traces the transformation of this native culture, that spreads like a stem of the cotton plant to all pores of modern music.

Nataša Njegovanovic-Ristic, senior curator