Should I Stay or Should I Go
Solo exhibition by Nada Prlja at NI Museum of Contemporary Art, Skopje, Macedonia
2008
Curator Zoran Petrovski
Prlja's project Should I Stay or Should I Go is a brutal illustration of the socio-political processes that belong to the current reality of less self-sufficient, financially dependent countries. By raising issues related to fair trade in this post-industrial society, the project strives to communicate with and to alert the public about the workers' reality of today, with the intention of raising the general awareness and of making a direct change in contemporary society, by blurring the division between financially stronger and weaker societies.
For the opening evening performance, an industrial production line will be relocated to the main space of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Skopje, Macedonia, where employees from MakJeans (one of numerous 'sewing factories' in the Macedonian textile industry) and the artist Nada Prlja herself, will produce a large number of T-shirts, while simulating the current conditions of such textile industries in Macedonia.
The exhibition's title, Should I Stay or Should I Go represents the dilemma embedded within the workers' reality: little hope of progress in the local industry, in which many human rights legislations are being disregarded (long working hours, low salaries, low safety conditions, etc) and the workers' desperate resolution to emigrate elsewhere - in many cases illegally - in the search for better conditions and a better future.
To represent the reality of emigrants, Prlja exhibits four videos filmed in London, in which the artist empathizes with the emigrants' situation and the difficulties, complications and disappointments that can occur while trying to adopt something unknown and otherwise foreign to themselves.
