In “Keep Working on Love”, a multimedia installation with a video essay (2024), the artist, who emigrated to Germany in 2008 and became a German citizen ten years later, deals with the embodiment of trans-cultural / a-national becoming. Drawing upon her own biography and that of the her late grandfather, a Yugoslav state servant, the artist engages with detachment processes from homogenising nationalist and cultural modes. Sidjimovska’s installation reconstructs and transforms two spaces – the artist’s working space, where she takes notes and conceptualises decolonizing thoughts, and that of her grandfather, where he self-educated and compiled recipes for cookbooks on his typewriter. The video essay combines footage of the artist preparing a sweet pastry from his cookbook and footages of decade long observations of her old and new hometowns, Berlin and Skopje. Interventions in urban space in the service of state narratives interweave with her own intimate transformations between two cultures and national systems.
Multimedia installation with video-essay 35′, Museum of Contemporary Art – Skopje, North Macedonia, 2024
