Exhibition: Making Beauty: Elpida Hadzi-Vasileva


Exhibition
Out of Hours

GUT FEELING
Making Beauty: Elpida Hadzi-Vasileva
Djanogly Gallery, Nottingham 
20 August 2016 – 30 October 2016

Making Beauty is a site-specific installation 
at Djanogly Gallery in Nottingham by 
the artist Elpida Hadzi-Vasileva. She is a 
highly-respected artist from Macedonia 
who has exhibited at the Venice Biennale 
representing her country, and the Vatican. 
The exhibition contains reconfigurations of 
two previous major works of Hadzi-Vasileva; 
Fragility, previously in the Fabrica gallery in 
Brighton, and Haruspex, commissioned by  
the Vatican in 2015 for display in its Pavilion 
at the Venice Biennale. 

Supported by Wellcome Trust funding, 
the artist collaborated with three digestive-
disease specialist departments at 
University College Hospital (London), the 
University of East Anglia (Norwich), and the 
University of Nottingham, for the past year. 
She has taken inspiration from both her 
time spent in laboratory settings as well as 
direct conversations with patients. Some 
of her exhibition pieces have even been 
made using models and techniques from 
the novel technology used in these medical 
research departments.

On entering the exhibition one is 

immediately struck by the lace-like 
structure suspended from the ceiling. This 
work, entitled Fragility (above) is composed 
of preserved caul fat painstakingly 
transformed into shimmering transparent 
sheets. These layers of hanging sheets with 
vein-like lace patterns transform the room 
into a cloud-like environment. At the end of 
this room, a spherical object is suspended 
from the ceiling and is titled Haruspex. 
This piece conveys an eerie feeling with its 
tentacle-like structures draping down to 
the floor. 

Following this grand entrance, the 
exhibition flows to the right with many 
individual smaller pieces of the artist’s 
work. What I found most interesting was 
the dome-shaped cow’s stomach playing 
gurgling bowel sounds (left); it is certainly 
a surreal experience listening to digestive 
sounds coming from what was once a living 
stomach!

The gallery is accompanied by an 
insightful video interview introducing Hadzi- 
Vasileva; despite the the obvious intricate 
level of planning and preparation needed to 
create these works she intrigues us further 
by saying she ‘never knows what each piece 
is going to look like until it’s complete’.

That I suppose is the beauty and 
curse of using natural products for art. 
The overarching concept throughout the 

exhibition is one of ‘life afer death’ and I 
believe the artist has fulfilled this ambition 
as she has created exactly that with these 
dead pieces of tissue now becoming lasting 
pieces of art. 

Gurvinder Sahota, 
Clinical Assistant Professor in Primary Care, 
Division of Primary Care, School of Medicine, The 
University of Nottingham, Nottingham.

E-mail:  gurvinder.sahota@nottingham.ac.uk

Making Beauty: Elpida Hadzi-Vasileva is exhibiting 
at Djanogly Gallery, Nottingham Lakeside Arts, 
Nottingham, until October 30th 2016. 

www.lakesidearts.org.uk/

DOI: 10.3399/bjgp16X687445

532  British Journal of General Practice, October 2016

 Elpida Hadzi-Vasileva, Rendition of Self, 2016, Cow 
stomach, turned wood, audio, photo Nick Dunmur, 
courtesy Elpida Hadzi-Vasileva.

Elpida Hadzi-Vasileva, Fragility, 2015; caul fat, plastic, metal and wire; 2400 cm x 7350 cm x 700 cm, Fabrica 
Gallery, Brighton, England; Photo: Tom Thistlethwaite, © the artist, courtesy the artist.