NEsT, exhibition of the female art group MOMI, Graphic Studio – Museum of the City Skopje, Macedonia (2018)
In the “NEsT” project, MOMI are constructing the artwork throughout a complex process which starts with a task self-assignment, each of the women to keep her own moon diary, and lunar period is the one that lasts as long as the woman’s lunar cycle, thus the period of the moon’s phase’s change or 28 days. In their diary, each MOMI member "documents" her daily activities from the most trivial things to the most essential, from the most intimate to the most professional.
In the following phase, after the moon book is written, the authors exchange their diaries, therefore opening up to one another in a deeper manner, hereby setting their privacy to a higher concern and in function of art.
The purport of each author is to comprehend the second (the third, the fourth, the fifth, the sixth, the seventh) more substantially, deeply and in response to the experienced and perceived, to create one work for each group member, including herself. The final phase of the process is every MOMI member ultimate work to be presented publicly – an art book which is made according to certain dimensions that each author follows as consistently as possible.
Ana Ivanovska opts for the common circle symbol that appears in all the pages of the book, symbolizing The Moon, but divided in a half, it shapes two forms similar to yin and yang forms, which eventually become reshaped into a fetus – a baby in the womb, thus emphasizing the connection between the lunar phase and the female lunar cycle. Particularly accentuated is the mutual dependence of the circle and the square, which multiply as eternal interlacing, interdependence and ontology.
Excerpt from the text for the catalog of the curator Ana Frangovska