Artist Igor Josifov Unties Dada at San Francisco Arts Festival
Dadaism, the art movement that stuck its nose up to conventional political, social and cultural values, is turning 100 this year. To celebrate such an important milestone, the San Francisco International Arts Festival and Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture have combined to host “Dada: Here and Now,” a festival that has rallied over 100 performances by 50 different ensembles.
Igor Josifov, the celebrated performance and mixed media artist, is one of those challenged to apply the boundary pushing school of thought Dadaism had in the 20th Century to our current, technology-fueled 21st Century.
“For me, art helps record how people lived historically,” Josifov said. “I knew a lot of the history of Dadaism, but last month I saw a piece by Soupault at an exhibition in Zurich, where Dadaism started, that I found really relative. It said, ‘Give us the runway, and we will lift the world.’”
“For me, art helps record how people lived historically,” Josifov said. “I knew a lot of the history of Dadaism, but last month I saw a piece by Soupault at an exhibition in Zurich, where Dadaism started, that I found really relative. It said, ‘Give us the runway, and we will lift the world.’”
While Josifov won’t be lifting the world, he will be suspended in air, tied up and surrounded by a giant sculpture of his own creation. Josifov’s piece, titled “Untie,” is a sculptural installation examining societal rules that frame behavior versus an individual’s right to free expression. He will perform it on May 29.
“It’s like a big self portrait that’s not about me, but about how I perceive my situations,” Josifov said. “‘Untie’ is a combination of things. One part of the floating sculpture will resemble a human form, but grows into a mountain. And fire-made reflections of my memories merge into one collective experience that’s reflective of my place in the world.
“I’ll be inside the floating piece tied up in more of the flame drawings. So it’s like being naked, but covered by my memories and reflections.”
His signature tool of choice, fire, plays an important part in “Untie,” and has been at the foreground of his work over the last 10 years.
“Curators in Paris and Macedonia would ask if I was tired of the burning after a few years, but I felt like I hadn’t even started,” he said.
While working with fire, Igor discovered a reflection method where the flame transfers from one pressed canvas to the next, leaving markings and impressions of different textures and colors based on the length of time and consistency of the paper. His method is meticulous and requires his undivided attention.
“For me it’s like meditation,” Josifov began explaining, “because you really have to be in a peaceful state of mind when you work with fire. There’s no way you can make mistakes or else everything gets destroyed.”
His memories in “Untie” are what’s burned onto the sculpture’s canvas, expertly exploring Dadaism in the 21st century. As a society, we burn the bodies of those we’ve lost and treasure, the embers left behind to assist in bringing up their memories. Josifov takes this concept further and immortalizes his own memories and thoughts by burning them into a canvas. It’s a process he attributes to his affinity for nature and his ever-evolving curiosity for the elements.
“We move with life like a river,” Josifov said. “So the faces that are drawn and then burned become separate faces and waves. And the river is collective like life. When I compress the two paper layers and there’s no oxygen between them, it’s almost like water, so it becomes very free form. I love the process. I live for it.”
It’s an artistic life that was passed down as he was raised in Macedonia by a family heavily involved in the arts. His grandparents were artists their whole lives: his grandfather, a prolific sculptor whose pieces were featured publicly throughout Macedonia until his passing, while his grandmother is still a successful printmaker and painter. His younger years were spent with his family in the studio, watching his elders create, but he was simultaneously trying to find his own voice as an artist. His quest to find his place in the art world led the way to earning a BFA at the Academy of Art in San Francisco where he explored other artistic methods.
“San Francisco was where I started doing performance work, performing for art fairs, museums all around the world and learning how to use materials and identifying their own symbolic value,” he said. “I love how one idea about something, anything, can grow into a multimedia installation celebrated with a film, with a performance, with actual works and collaborations with other artists that understand and support the idea in their own way. It’s exciting.”
After finding out he’s lived in San Francisco for 12 years, I asked if a world traveler and performer like himself considers the City home.
His answer was rich in Dadaist influences.
“The body is like the home, in a way, but San Francisco is my home,” he said. “It represents a different time in my life in my development as a creative person. I learned so much and experienced so many different rhythms of life. At the same time, I was always travelling all around the world. If I stayed in Macedonia, I never would have made the work I’m making now.
“It’s like how you draw a portrait: you have to step back to see the face, otherwise you’ll only see eyelashes. When I moved to San Francisco, I saw my life from a different perspective. The works I produced in San Francisco were about my identity and finding myself. Liberating myself from the limits of society.”
I asked what he thought of the recent cultural shift that’s shaken up San Francisco, but again he saw things from a grander perspective.
“The whole world is constantly transforming, but it’s out of balance in a way,” he said. “With these new technologies we have such access to information, but it gets so overwhelming that it’s not the same to experience things. I think contemporary art like at ‘Here and Now’ reflect how things are in the world. I think it’s very important, even for self-therapy, to find your own creative rhythm in life to keep your spirits up.”
Tickets to witness Josifov’s “Untie” can be purchased here:http://www.sfiaf.org/dada_here_and_now_visual_arts_symposium_part_2
Note: This article originally appeared on Ripple.co, which has been acquired and now appears on Hoodline.
