The project "Bitter Sugar" by Macedonian artist Đorđe Jovanović is composed of two parts, a spatial installation and animated puppet shows, conceived as fragments of current reality and contemporary life; fragments that contain signs, conditions and situations that refer simultaneously to the local context, but also to the influences and interdependence with global flows.

Conceived as a "total work of art", this project, through a rich iconographic fund and a complex network of relations, as well as by combining several artistic disciplines (visual art and experimental film, animation and music), focuses on deepening the connections between these art forms, as well as on exploring the possibilities for creating new artistic content. Through this project, Jovanović integrates his previous creative practice, which encompasses the most diverse expressive forms and media from drawing and installation, to performativity and interactivity. The project represents a synthesis and upgrading of the experiences of the historical avant-garde, especially Dadaist and surrealist interventions, in an attempt to transform and use them in the contemporary context, burdened with the challenges of (post)pandemic political and technological reality. The interweaving of the real and the surreal and the extreme points of their meeting are also reflected through the merging of various genres. In the spatial installation, which consists of a huge number of images and objects, as well as the animations that activate it, Jovanović strives to create a multidimensional narrative network through which the numerous protagonists and the different situations they find themselves in are transformed to another level, as a total picture of chaotic modernity.

The animated videos are a collection of poetic, humorous, and tragicomic stories, based on Jovanović's ideas, as well as short stories by several representatives of the newer generation of Macedonian writers (Rumena Bužarovska, Petar Andonovski, Aleks Bukarski, etc.). Their focus is on uncertainty, ignorance, through personal stories, tragedies and troubles of people on the margins, and by showing extremes of human behavior in the struggle and breaking of stereotypes in a patriarchal society and the search for justice and freedom.

This project, through a multi-layered and multi-sensory artistic intervention, aims to open space for reexamining interpersonal relationships, and to speak out about the conditions at the local and global levels in the face of a complex social situation, which is determined by numerous crises and existential uncertainty.

Gjorge Jovanovic (Skopje, 1980) has realized several projects focusing on the issues of integration and disintegration of modern man. In his works, he reexamines interpersonal relationships in the context of the general state of redefinition of universal values, the relationship between man and society and consumerism as a key factor of the modern way of life, politics as a factor of the disintegration of cities, states and families. The element of self-referentiality is also present, as well as the reexamination of oneself in a narrower and broader context of the disintegration of old values ​​and the creation of new ones. He works with installations, performances, objects, videos, collages and paintings in order to achieve a transformation of artistic expression and individual expression, following the fluidity of the contemporary context.  

He has held several solo exhibitions in the country and abroad, including: "The Beheaded" - Prima Center Berlin (Berlin, 2020), "Chocolate Drops" - Hoast Gallery (Vienna, 2018), "Radio Free Skopje" - Center for Contemporary Arts (Skopje, 2015-16), "Inventions for You, Beautiful People!" - Museum of Contemporary Art (Skopje, 2014), "Confessions of a Cake Eater" (Rovinj, 2013), "The Fragmentary Archive of an Artist from a Country in Transition" (New York, 2010), "It'sComplicated" (Graz, 2010), etc.

Residencies: IAAB – Basel, TICA – Tirana, La Cité internationale des Arts – Paris, Watermill Center New York, "Apartment Project" – Istanbul, ISCP – New York, CCN – Graz.

The curators of the exhibition are: Vladimir Jancevski and Blagoja Varošanec.