From letter to space, from cultural memory to immersive experience
On 21 August 2026 at 20:00, the Museum of Contemporary Art – Skopje will open Immersive Transformation of the Glagolitic, a solo exhibition by Laze Tripkov.
The exhibition is curated by Lenka Sýkorová, with Vladimir Janchevski as co-curator.
The project is the result of a six-year artistic and research process initiated in 2020. It approaches the Glagolitic script not as a closed historical artefact, but as a living and open structure of meaning — one that can be read anew, transformed, and brought into new relationships with the present.
Every alphabet is a technology of thought.
Before becoming a vehicle of language, an alphabet exists as a system of visual, phonetic, and semantic principles through which human beings organise experience and give form to the invisible.
Created in the ninth century at the intersection of language, geometry, and Christian symbolism, the Glagolitic script represents one of the earliest consciously constructed visual systems within Slavic cultural tradition. Within this project, it is not treated as a relic of the past, but as an active medium capable of continuing to generate meaning in the present.
From printed surface to immersive space
The exhibition unfolds as a gradual transition across different media.
The visitor begins with the traditional printed poster — a flat, silent, and motionless surface — before moving through three-dimensional objects, animation and video towards interactive and immersive digital environments.
Through virtual and augmented reality, spatial sound, haptic feedback, interactive design, and gamification, the Glagolitic letter is progressively liberated from the static surface.
It is no longer simply a sign to be read.
The letter becomes a space to be experienced.
Surface acquires depth, the letter acquires time, and the visitor is given a place within the work itself. Rather than remaining a passive observer, the audience becomes an active participant in the production of meaning.
Cultural memory as a living process
Immersive Transformation of the Glagolitic does not seek to reconstruct the history of the script.
Instead, it examines how contemporary subjects experience history and how our relationship with cultural heritage is transformed within the digital age.
Immersive technologies are therefore not employed as technological spectacle. They function as instruments through which historical signs acquire new forms of presence, interaction, and interpretation.
Within the fluid continuum between the material and the virtual, past and future, historical knowledge and contemporary digital subjectivity, Glagolitic is reactivated as a living cultural entity.
Cultural memory is no longer understood as something merely preserved and observed from a distance. It is experienced, questioned, and recreated through each new act of reading, movement, and interaction.
Six years of research and transformation
The project has been developing since 2020, through successive phases of research, experimentation, exhibition, and audience testing.
During this process, aspects of the research and project have been presented in New York, Kraków, Stockholm, Malmö, Bratislava, Rijeka, Nitra, Ústí nad Labem, and Belgrade, while its academic development has also been supported through exchanges and collaborations with the Royal College of Art in London, Jagiellonian University in Kraków, and institutions in the Czech Republic.
What began as an exploration of the poster, virtual reality, and principles of play gradually evolved into a complex spatial system responsive to architecture, the body, movement, and the visitor’s presence.
A particularly decisive contribution to the development of the project came from Ivan Kikerkov, whose sustained professional expertise, personal commitment, and close involvement played a central role in shaping and structuring the project. His contribution provided the project with a solid conceptual and technical foundation, securing the conditions for its further development within virtual reality and establishing a clear framework for its future evolution.
From 2023 onward, the project further expanded through collaboration with the game-development platform Galactic Omnivore, whose technical and creative expertise contributed to the development of its interactive and immersive environments. This was followed, in 2025, by collaboration with video artist Emil Petro, whose work contributed to the project’s audiovisual and moving-image dimension.
The exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art – Skopje presents the project for the first time in its most extensive and fully developed form to date.
Yet it does not represent a conclusion.
Immersive Transformation of the Glagolitic remains an open research process — a space for continuing inquiry into the relationship between script, cultural memory, the human body, and technology.
Exhibition information
Exhibition: Immersive Transformation of the Glagolitic
Artist: Laze Tripkov
Curator: Lenka Sýkorová
Co-curator: Vladimir Janchevski
Opening: 21 August 2026, 20:00
Venue: Museum of Contemporary Art – Skopje
The project is supported by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, Halkbank, Galactic Omnivore, Agricultural Institute – Skopje, and Pakomak, with A1 Macedonia as the main sponsor of the digital heritage component.
