Curated by: Thibaut de Ruyter
Artists: Dren Maliqi, Driton Hajredini, Jakup Ferri, Merita Harxhi-Koci
Did the art scene from Kosovo radically change during the last twenty years? Are artists producing again and again the same kind of artworks? Does their art evolve with the political situation that surrounds them or the places where they exhibit? Those questions – and a few more – are the starting point of Back to the Gorges of Balkan…
In 2003, the famous German curator René Block organised in Kassel a large exhibition with no less than 90 artists from ex-Yugoslavia, Albania, Turkey, Greece, Bulgaria and Romania. The title of the show – In den Schluchten des Balkan [In the Gorges of the Balkan] – was taken from a novel written by Karl May in 1892 and emphasised with irony the fact that Western Europe was finally looking at a rather unknown art scene and territory.
Exactly twenty years later we reconstruct, in the Galeria 17, the participation of some of the artists from Kosovo and present artworks that were on display in Germany to the visitors in Pristina. It is a unique chance to discover early videos or installations from renowned Kosovar artists, to explore the archive of a seminal exhibition but, also, to see what has changed (or not) in the local art scene during the last two decades. From the seven participants from Kosovo in the 2003 project, four accepted to go in their archive and reactivate their artworks.
With “Face to Face” (2003), Dren Maliqi invents the impossible meeting of Elvis Presley (1935–1977) with Adem Jashari (1955–1998). The rock star, as depicted by Andy Warhol, points his gun to the hero and victim of the Kosova liberation war. Two personalities are facing each other, the first from the history of pop culture and American art, the second from a violent actuality and media coverage. Shkëlzen Maliqi wrote, in the original catalogue from the Kassel exhibition: ‘The essential gesture of heroes emphasised in this artwork is related to the weapons held on alert, as a paradoxically violent gesture that ensures the safety and the dignity of the individuals and societies constantly facing violent threats. As for the heroic liberator Adem Jashari, the irony here consists of the transformation from an outstanding and tragic figure into a serialised and ordinary icon for mass consumption, same as a show business star.’ For this new presentation Dren Maliqi adds a silkscreen print from the reproduction of his artwork in newspapers, as a sign of the dissolution of images thru time.
Merita Harxhi-Koci – nowadays a famous clothes designer in Pristina –, did in 2003 a poster for a fictive election campaign. Dressed in an official way, like all politicians do, she poses seriously in front of the Albanian flag and runs ‘for President of Kosova’ under the ‘Contemporary Art Party’. This was, at the time, a statement towards the unclear status of the nation (Kosovo gained its independence in 2008 only). But the amazing part in this artwork is to notice that nothing has really changed in the aesthetic of political campaigns during the last 20 years – officials still present themselves with this kind of outfit, haircut and smile. The artistic fiction became real life as the country had a woman for president, Atifete Jahjaga, and is now ruled by another, Vjosa Osmani. As if Merita Harxhi-Koci, in her feminist claim, was foreseeing the future.
Driton Hajredini asked in 2003 quite a simple question: ’Who Killed the Painting?’ The title of his installation, and the installation itself, refer to a crime scene. A line on the floor indicates the position of a dead body (of a rectangular shape), a stripe of police tape keeps the visitors away. Painting was, indeed, assassinated many times during the 20th century, not only by the conceptual invention of Ready-Made, but also by photography, video-art, sound art or performance. All those media and revolutions contributed to the existence of contemporary art as we know it. But painting is still a very successful technique on the art market and many visitors from museums do not want to see anything else. Twenty years later, the case is still open and nobody knows who was the murderer or where the body is who was still laying down in the exhibition space a few minutes ago…
Shortly before going to Kassel, Jakup Ferri recorded a small video-message from his family to René Block. His parents wished a lot of success to their son in Germany, hoping he ‘be careful … in an unknown place’ and that ‘after the exhibition, please, [he] come back home’. What could be a simple joke was, of course, a pun on the importance of the German curator arriving in the remote Balkan and taking the enfant prodige to the big city, the vast continent, the globalised art world. A similar irony can be seen in Save me, Help me (2003) – another video where the young artist reflects on his production and presents his works to potential collectors or curators. Obviously, the fact that a curator ‘from the west’ came to select and exhibit artists from Kosovo was seen as a chance and a step into a future career, but without naivety or wrong expectations – it even inspired them in doing critical works about the situation.
In the Gorges of the Balkan was, shortly after the several wars that followed the collapse of Yugoslavia, a pun on the dangerous places that the region represented for the rest of Europe and a play with a mythology dating from the Ottoman Empire. That exhibition, which made internationally visible a whole new generation of artists, has become a landmark in art history for the quality of the curatorial research and the inventive artworks who pictured traumatic events, political uncertainties and critics of the globalised art world.
Looking today at artworks produced 20 years ago, it’s amazing to see how actual they still are. The artists not only created pieces that reflected their situation in their country, but also depicted their understanding of the role they had to play in the ‘western’ art world. The importance of international curators (Jakup Ferri), the possibility of painting in contemporary art (Driton Hajredini), the aesthetics of political campaigns and significance of feminist fight (Merita Harxhi-Koci) or the confrontation between different cultures and histories (Dren Maliqi) – not much has changed in the world and under the sky of contemporary art. And this makes those artworks more necessary than ever – they are not only a testimony or a simple archive from a past situation, from a period of transition, they continue to live and question us about art and society. They are, in a sense, timeless. As all good artworks should be.