ACADEMIC PEER REVIEWS
"Ways of Seeing and Benjamin/ Brecht / Zizek, are highly topical experiments of NFT art and as such, they exemplify a new technological way of creating and distributing so-called crypto art. These works were exhibited at Crypto and Digital Art Fair (CADAF), both physically in Paris and on the internet. CADAF is a young, but already an internationally recognised institution in the field of curated digital art exhibitions, and currently the prominent one focusing specifically on crypto art.(...)
The researcher’s NFT artworks were created to explore a critical media theory related research question. The first of them, Ways of Seeing, engages with John Berger’s famous book and TV series by problematising the embodiment of visual cognition in the NFT artwork. The second work, Benjamin/ Brecht/ Zizek, plays with the glitched portraits of Walter Benjamin, Bertold Brecht, and Slavoj Zizek, all influential in their thinking about the mediums and mechanisms through which (digital) culture and art are expected to operate. These visual artworks make it possible to examine the theoretical notions of cryptography and authenticity in the new digital media environment in an influential and thought-provoking way."
(Review of Ways of Seening and Benjamin / Brecht / Zizek, 2021)
"Rain, a short loop (2 minutes 40 seconds), shows footage of a rainstorm in lush vegetation over which incongruous poetry plays; for example, “Eat / positive / put / first / the / great / perspective / people / don’t / down / and / anyway / you’re / up” — with an eerie, metallic echoing sound. The researcher characterizes the creative process as based on the Dadaist cut-up technique: he cuts up and remixes statements from a popular psychology article, as one can divine from the video. It is a video poem that evokes the feeling of emotional disorientation so many people experienced during lockdown, and disrupts corporate self-help language. It answers his research questions well."
(Review of Rain, 2021)
"[The City Alone] is a 4:37 long edit of the original film, through which it is possible to explore the “posthuman condition”, a form of existence and co-existence between humans and other forms of life, non-human and technological alike. By removing human presence in the feature film, the artist urges his audiences to ask on what terms urban spaces are allowed to exist in an audiovisual form created by humans, and what kinds of meaning they might be allowed to incorporate after all the humans are gone, or taken away (like in this radical edit). (...)
The original film was selected as an “urtext” for this practice-based research project so that the artist could delve in studying posthuman thematics through audiovisual expression and narrative, as well as through the medium of the moving image itself. The resulting edit is intentionally rough and abrupt, and the focus on objects, locations, cityscapes, and the soundtrack is purposefully distracting as it was chosen to make the audience question their place and position in the world. These big and difficult themes are also present in the adjacent material submitted with the assessed work itself, for which I commend the artist."
(Review of The City Alone (2020 glitch edit), 2021)
"A digital animation, Crisis is a video art loop of 1.23 minutes without audio. Well-executed, Crisis provides viewers with an iconic cityscape of Hong Kong. Fire, explosions and buckling buildings create a sense of menace. The animation, which has a cinematic quality, invites reflection on public spaces and the processes of social and historical change."
(Review of Crisis, 2021)
"A digital animation, Crisis consists of a silent, brief (1:23) loop showing, from a high angle, a blazing combustion between two massive buildings that uncannily quiver, melt, and re-form. It evokes the anti-government protests in Hong Kong in 2020, seen from the point of view of worried financial and institutional powers. It is a brief but effective work that responds well to the research question."
(Review of Crisis, 2021)
“The artist’s meta-approach and his visual language, through the utilization of a multitude of sign structures and media, constitute a very interesting reading of the current situation, which he describes as an 'event'. The diversity of contexts, relations, meanings and the philosophical background of the work, as well as the way that these elements interconnect and interrelate, proposes a new way of reconstructing established models and modes of narration, leading to the emergence of something all-new and exciting.”
(Review of Utopia, 2020)
“Pink: Psyche and Cupid’s Kiss is an accomplished painting which displays originality and has received a recommendation from a distinguished jury in the competition Premio Combat Prize 2020. It was selected from 1,402 submissions... The artist’s research question How can classical myth be reinterpreted in contemporary painting? is relevant to contemporary painting discourse and his writing about the history and processes involved in producing the artwork displays a good deal of critical reflection and originality.”
(Review of Pink, 2020)
“Because pink is not only in the artwork but also sets the tone for the title, colour is more than just the medium; it is also part of the subject. The artist references the Renaissance, but Pop art translates pink into a more aggressive flesh tone. This works creates a flimmering effect that reflects the hectic tempo of our times. The combination of multiple media and historic/mythological narratives place Poposki in the tradition of artists such as Roy Liechtenstein and Robert Rauschenberg.”
(Review of Pink, 2020)
"Dr. Zoran Poposki’s creative work assessment demonstrates international leadership, international excellence and international recognition... Dr. Poposki’s creative work is clearly a reference for other artists/professionals on an international level... His research has a key point of reference regarding the history of art on an international scale regarding the artist as subject matter. While his research is visually in reference to ‘monumental figures’, it is self-reflective and is an abstracted self portrait. Not that Poposki's research physically resembles the work of historically significant artists such as Joseph Beuys, Hannah Wilke, Vito Acconci or Cindy Sherman etc., I do believe there are significant and notable connections."
(Review of Theoria, 2017)
"Dr. Poposki's work The Wrestler contributes to an important area of research for postmodern artists working in a diversity of disciplines: the relationship of traditional visual art practice (in his case drawing) with the accelerating proliferation of digital visual media across our global culture. In this respect the medium of the animated "glitch gif" has the interesting potential to become an intervention in, and critique of, the various ways in which information and entertainment is disseminated globally... This work is described as a digital echo of Eugene Delacroix’ mural Jacob Wrestling with an Angel. There are all sorts of interesting resonances to that echo. The uncertainty of Jacob is replayed through the fragmentation of the digital image; the stable wall on which Delacroix painted the two figures wrestling (who are far from stable) becomes a flashing and immaterial surface in the GIF; the colours of Delacroix turn acid in the GIF. Very interesting work."
(Review of The Wrestler, 2016)
"Dr Zoran Poposki’s Hong Kong Atlas series of five works combine digital image overlays to startling effect. The broody, saturated world that Dr. Poposki depicts is composed of multiple photographs... By creating chromatically rich, translucent layers of various opacities, a ‘mixing’ of colour takes place not dissimilar to ink painting or multi-panel silkscreen prints. (...)The vertical format is akin to scroll painting in that the recession of space occurs as one looks from bottom to top. The density of image overlay recalls the screenprint paintings of Robert Rauschenberg. In amongst the depiction of architecture, signage, electric wire, streetlights and other urban imagery from Hong Kong, there are emblems, designs and logos of businesses suggesting a global theme. The tone shifts slightly with Hong Kong Atlas 4, where more earthy tones replace the saturated reds, greens and blues of the other four works. In this work, what seems to be the hull of boat is placed travelling sidelong along the bottom portion of the print, a reference to Hong Kong’s important waterways as a port city. The density of images built up in successive layers creates dark, abstracted zones where it is difficult to make out the imagery. This revealing and obscuring of the image is a dominant theme throughout the series, giving a somber effect to the works and an air of mystery and even foreboding."
(Review of Hong Kong Atlas, 2016)
"Zoran Poposki’s multimedia artworks capture the high energy of Asia’s internationalist urban centres, such as in Hong Kong. Haptic surfaces and dynamic spatial compositions exploiting the luminescent, translucent qualities of digital media, are deployed to infer temporal narrative content and site specificity derived from Poposki’s field research of the text based depictions of Hong Kong in Kai-cheung Dung’s novel, Atlas: the Archeology of an Imaginary City. (...)Poposki’s experimental oeuvre, with its provenance in Pop Art collage, expands upon Robert Rauschenberg’s collages, and places Poposki’s contribution to visual arts research using digital media technologies experimentally."
(Review of Hong Kong Atlas, 2016)
"The multi-media picture Crisis displays the word itself as if stenciled in crayola colours against thin layers of yellows, green and gray paint dripping and soaking into the canvas. Above both are two geometric systems: a three-dimensional universally recognized mathematical figure (a tetrahedron?) and a two-dimensional representation of perhaps the same figure, flattened down like a web across the canvas. This is an intensely thought-provoking work, as it asks the viewer to make sense of cheerful colours used to convey a concept that we typically associate with violence within a compositional structure that does and doesn't make sense, one that confines the eye and expands beyond the canvas at the same time. This is exciting work, and I am happy it has found a place in the Imago Mundi collection."
(Review of Crisis, 2015)