A selection of works from the valuable art collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art - Skopje will be presented for the first time in the space of the "Kunsthalle Wien Museumsquartier", one of the largest European cultural centers.

The Museum informs that the exhibition "No Feeling is Final." The Skopje Solidarity Collection" will be opened on April 20.

For the first time in Vienna, a selection of works from the valuable art collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art - Skopje will be presented. This big presentation is the result of the cooperation between the two art institutions MSU - Skopje and Kunsthalle Vienna. The exhibition is curated by the artistic directors of the Kunsthalle Vienna, the curatorial collective What, How & for Who (WHW) – Ivet Kurlin, Natasa Ilic and Sabina Sabolovic. The curators invited four international contemporary artists and an artistic duo, who were tasked with making their own selection from the valuable collection of MSU and devised a setting that would establish a dialogue between the works of those artists and their author's work. The idea is to see how today's artists experience this collection, created through worldwide solidarity, the announcement states.

From the total art collection of MSU, which counts over 5.500 works, 94 and about 50 of the contemporary artists involved in this project will be exhibited in Vienna.

The cooperation of MSU with the Kunsthalle Vienna is the most complex project for our museum so far. This presentation is not only a project of MSU, but an event of national interest for our country. Not only because a large number of works from our collection will be exhibited, but also because of the fact that the works can be viewed in a visited space, such as the Kunsthalle, in the center of the museum district in tourist Vienna. This complex operation encourages us to plan even more ambitious projects and cooperation with other partner institutions across Europe. We are pleased that the exhibition in Vienna, which has not yet opened, is already attracting so much interest, that perhaps next year it will also be a guest in Prague, says Mira Gaqina, director of MSU - Skopje, in a written statement.

The curators closely connect the concept and title of the exhibition with how the MSU art collection was built.

After the catastrophic earthquake in 1963 in Skopje, in addition to the great material damage and the many human victims, the United Nations and the International Association of Artists considered that culture is also a key link in raising the spirit of the people of Skopje. Therefore, they initiated a call to world-famous artists to donate works. The numerous donations of works of art made MSU a symbol of solidarity, which today is a permanent value in the collective memory of the Macedonian public, the announcement states.

As it is clarified, "part of the exhibition will also contain a documentary section about Skopje, the transformation of the city and the story of MSU and its collection, documents and the model of Kenzo Tange, borrowed from the archives of the Museum of the City of Skopje and the archive of MSU. This means that in one of the European capitals and most famous art centers, the precious collection of MSU and the city of Skopje will be affirmed. Five architectural models of post-earthquake Skopje, part of the collection of Jovan Ivanovski, Ana Ivanovska Deskova and Vladimir Deskov, will be presented at the exhibition."

The exhibition at the Kunsthalle Vienna will be open until January 28, 2024.