Tocka

Nada Prlja - Serious Interests Agency
 

Nada Prlja (1971) is one of the most distinguished Macedonian artists from the recent generation. Her artistic sensibility, interwoven from the multi-meaningness of the lyrical levels of visualization, from one side, and from the precisely defined intellectual reaction of the political and social context, from the other, results in a complex art, which offers possibility of different "readings" and which always surprises despite the strong and recognizable artistic credo. What is important to mention is that Nada Prlja significantly influenced one wave of thinking of the conceptual art in Macedonia.
Nada Prlja diplommaed from the Faculty of Visual Arts in 1997. In 1998 she got Ph.D. from The Royal College of Arts in London from the Department of Visual Communication. Since than she lives and works in London.

The last exhibition Nada Prlja had in Skopje was the brave conceptual project, in 1997, Walking on the water according to dr. Knapp, placed in the Rehabilitation Institute in Kozle.

In London, Prlja participated in four exhibitions. Her recent work is focused on the personal identity. This theme is connected with her recent projects, still under preparation, which includes an artistic book called Changeable facts. In this work, on the example of the development of the life story of Osama Bin Laden she questions the possibilities of change in the identity and of the life facts under the influence of the social laws and rules of play.

The exhibition Serious Interests Agency is in fact return of Nada Prlja on the Macedonian art scene after longer period of time. In the same time, it is a connecting tissue between her Macedonian and Londoner feeling of the world and the actual reality. In Serious Interests Agency Prlja re-examines the contents of the dailies. She states her concern about the world, creating parallel between the newspapers in London ("Metro") and in Skopje. The exhibition consists of three conceptual phases called "agencies": Daily news Agency, Commercialization Agency and Contacts and Dates Agency.
Each of them reworks different ideas. The first, deals with the stories referring to negative events and coverage published in one day. The artist uses censorship by physically deleting all the stories save those, which refer on the negative events. The second. The Commercialization Agency stresses again the attack and the amount of adds thus making an intervention on all the places in the newspaper where aggressive commercials were put.

The third, Contacts and Dates Agency brings the poetry back in the disturbingly formal conception in the "personal contacts" adds in the Skopje newspapers.