Artists: Anri Sala, Erzen Shkololli, Sislej Xhafa, Sokol Beqiri, Gentian Shkurti. 

When I first got the proposal to work on this project of doing a show with Albanian artists in Israel I didn’t have a specific title in mind. I just started to think of a possible selection of the group of the artists, focusing on a selection of relatively new art works that they would have done recently. Obviously knowing their work in general very well I knew that the show I was going to prepare would consist of political art statements from the artists, as much of the Albanian contemporary art that reflects our situation is, but how would one relate it to a new context like the Israeli one, in which the show is taking place? 

Here I started to draw a parallel between what would conceptually be a similar situation which the art works presented and the basis upon which Albanian artists are operating. What most of the work from the artists in this group deal with are the new problems that are born in an in-between space, a space which is created by and in the tension of a cultural clash, a phenomena that fully belongs to our contemporary society. Thus I considered these works as a quest towards giving voice and shape to what seems to be an unresolved problem, that of acceptance and reception of mutual cultural backgrounds – thus in a way the quest for the missing link that in a reduced concept could be coined as ”harmony”. ”Harmony” as a political concept is already the common place, a banal issue, but indeed expresses some kind of projected desire of every side, obviously for different ends. Still it resembles a lot to a Utopian construction and therefore remains like some kind of challenge. 

On the other hand, this idea thrilled me a lot, when I thought of it in the Israeli context. Knowing the situation from several viewpoints, through which I had been going during my years at school in communism, and then through the mediated construction of TV reality, as you see it on the news, the cliche of ”harmony” turned out to be the perfect meeting point, as a concept, or even as a cliche if you like, that could be read and understood more easily. 

”Skinheads Swimming” is thus a multilayered kind of work, that bears with it a paradigmatic approach that can be read in many different ways. When entering the space, the viewer is confronted with a huge projection of a marvelous place, the Fontana di Trevi in Rome, very well known for many reasons. The second moment one realizes that there’s people in the fountain, and immediately the association with Felini’s ”Dolce Vita” is made. And indeed the artist’s intention is to create that association, in order to crash it badly when the camera zooms in. What you recognize in these people in the water, is the image of a skinhead, the symbol of intolerance, a social phenomena recycled or born as a response to the non-acceptance of the other. But as the action evolves, the viewer is endorsed by a sweet feeling of tenderness. The skinheads only act as a very romantic normal couple, kissing and hugging each other while swimming in the clear waters of Fontana di Trevi. 

This is Sislej Xhafa’s work that relies on a continuous friction between cultures; it needs conflicts and negotiations. In fact, Xhafa’s art has become like an exercise in turning weaknesses into strengths: he draws from the controversial imagery associated with his culture, in order to compose a portrait of the artist as a clandestine. All his interventions are carried out with the violence of a criminal act, piling up poor materials such as wood and newspapers, or on the other hand, mixing cheap jewelry and expensive furniture in a crass imitation of a wealthy, gangster-like lifestyle. As a perfect clandestine, Xhafa doesn’t possess any language that he can claim, but he can easily move from one context to another, working in the background, contaminating styles and idioms: photos, videos, objects and performances can all become part of Xhafa’s complex and often gigantic installations, or they can be used in a more discrete way, on the verge of the invisible, when the artist decides to disappear and mingle with reality. 

Consider the work, ’Kanagjeci.’ While Xhafa tries to transform negative stereotypes into a new form of the urban guerrilla, Erzen Shkololli, one of the youngest and most interesting artists still active in Kosova, works with the local rituals and folklore. Shkololli acts as a sort of instinctive and biased anthropologist: he re-enacts traditional ceremonies, while alluding to contemporary symbols and disillusions. It’s this indecision between past and present that makes Shkololli’s work a typical example of what it means to work in the Balkans today: we suffer from a tragic form of ideological strabismus, and we are lost between tradition and modernity, remembrance and hope, freedom and death. That’s a possible reading of Erzen’s video ’Kanagjeci,’ which seems to be some kind of readymade that the artist is putting in front of us, juxtaposing thus two different ways of perception of reality: tradition and contemporaneity, in a society that tries to comply with both of them, while they seem to reject one another. 

’Nocturnes’ by Anri Sala on the other hand, belongs to a generation of young artists that received their education after the change of the political system in Albania: a generation that grew up in a communist country and, all of a sudden, experienced the trauma of capitalism without even enjoying its advantages. From this ideological schizophrenia, Anri Sala has learnt to push the language of documentary to its radical conclusions, working on the borders between reality and absurdity. 

His work ’Nocturnes’ is a metaphor for the Balkan situation, as narrated by a mercenary and by an obsessive collector of fish and aquariums: without ever directly mentioning the words Bosnia, Albania, or Serbia, the two characters talk about cruelty and borders, animals and human beings, killing and surviving. In their descriptions, history and geography become slippery territories, bound to endless negotiations: a perennial struggle between truth and desire, fiction and autobiography. 

Adrian Paci is an artist that started to pave his way on the European contemporary art scene with works that were very much based on social narrative. In the video ’Apparition,’ on one side of a double projection, there’s the picture of a group of elders that very much resembles a family portrait from some strange Renaissance period. The contrast is made when one observes the frustration of this group in front of the camera, and their longing for the little angelic creature, their ness, that appears in front of them, high up on the wall. Everybody is watching the little girl’s lips, when she sings to them, and one can deeply experience their anxiety waiting for their turn to sing back to her, even if just virtually. 

Indeed, after the first emotional contact, this video piece offers more than that, and raises essential important questions on the relationships that stand on the basis of socio-political transformations of post-communist Albania. For the group of elderly, the song of ’hairy ship and little lamb,’ is more than just a song, it’s almost an anthem, part of their identity and culture. It’s more than just a simple song, because it’s related to dozens of memories of a past time, of their childhood, or that of their children, it’s a sort of code that helps understand the culture where they come from and to whom they belong. But what can we say in little Tea’s case though? What can she do with this song and to what extend shall it be part of her culture and education, and more over, what shall be the role and importance of cultural tradition of her country in a wider context for her? Watching her sing, one gets the impression that she’s singing a text relatively abstract to her. The distance between the two projected images, or put in other words, the void in between them becomes a relevant signifier, far more important than the images themselves. It is because it suggests the unavoidable ever-growing distance between her and her grandparents. The only common line (besides the blood connection between them) can be traced in the sound track, the same passing from one image to the other. But for how long shall this be the case? After several years (according to a rule that doesn’t accept exceptions), many of those chairs on the wall in front of Tea shall be empty. After some more years, she shall find herself seated in one of those, waiting impatiently for the appearance of her little ness. I wonder what song shall she sing then? 

In the years to come and in his following projects, the work of Beqiri takes a stronger twist towards dealing with the most obscure sides of human nature, though always related to war crimes. His work is very direct and extremely shocking to the viewer. The artist deliberately aims at challenging the limits of human behavior in front of extreme situations, by showing real acts of executions. In his video-performance project, ’Milka’ produced immediately after the end of the war in Kosova, Beqiri deals precisely with the topics of violence and war crimes. Through a direct gesture of irony the artist dressed up as an army commander, leads his toy-soldier army on a virtual battle on the gallery floor, while in the background some incredibly unbearable images of cows being butchered at point blank with sharp daggers are visible, making the viewer shiver at their sight. It’s really hard for someone to stand such images till the very end, and the timely introduction of the Happy Cow wrapped up in the famous Milka chocolate label is an even more merciless view in what appears to be not only a protest against the war and crimes. 

Born in Peja in 1964, Sokol Beqiri is one of the key figures of this generation of artists, bringing along a new approach to art practices in Kosova, until recently arched in traditionalism and academism. The kind of reality he reflects in his works is dirty, aggressive, submerging, oppressive and almost without a way out. 

The display of human cruelty reaches its maximum on another project entitled ’When the Angels are Late.’ Confronted with a nice, large baroque painting, depicting the angel holding Abraham’s hand while offering his son to God, the viewer can hear the sound of a human plea, a cry, followed by some unclear noise. At eye level, a spy-hole’s been put in the image on the middle. If one dares to look through, the videotaped image shows the real time execution of a young man, his throat being cut with a knife. It’s a freezing image, no one can really stand it. The limit has been pushed too far. It’s not any more some kind of protest against the war and the crimes. It touches the deepest, diabolic, darkest nature of humankind. 

Being the youngest artist of this group, Gentian Shkurti’s ’Go West’ is more based on a funny use of a computer game toy which is much closer to his generation. Using sharp irony on the mediated constructed imagery of Albania and Albanians, Shkurti creates an interactive video game, meant to be played by the viewer, asking thus not only for his interaction, but for his involvement. It is an involvement, because the aesthetics and the function of such a thing as a video game requires it from the viewer/user; when you play it you’re not a passive receiver anymore, but you become an active performer of whatever act is offered to you through the game. It is upon these preconceptions of the medium that Shkurti constructs his intervention, by using such a delicate subject as the clandestine traffic towards Italy, taking place for many years on the Albanian shores. But on the other hand he’s not simply re-staging a narrative situation, but is changing it by offering you the challenge to play and win the game, and thus have fun and enjoy it, but at the same time questioning a whole constructed, or manipulated mentality if you like. ’Go West’ is a paradigmatic title that plays with cliches in many layers, touching upon many perceptions, addressed to any possible side involved in the process. 

These works thus bear witness to a wide range of social textures and all the problems interwoven in those textures, that contemporary society has to deal with. They thus propose a 
critical sweet Utopia, through a bitter reality. This process does not claim the ultimate change of human conditions, however, but is rather offering us a chance to take our time with one of the biggest problems we’re faced with today – that of understanding each other. 

Edi Muka

Exhibitions & Projects
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 The CDA's archives are operating with the support of the Ostrovsky Family Fund and Artis
 

BITTER SWEET HARMONY

Artists: Anri Sala, Erzen Shkololli, Sislej Xhafa, Sokol Beqiri, Gentian Shkurti. 

When I first got the proposal to work on this project of doing a show with Albanian artists in Israel I didn’t have a specific title in mind. I just started to think of a possible selection of the group of the artists, focusing on a selection of relatively new art works that they would have done recently. Obviously knowing their work in general very well I knew that the show I was going to prepare would consist of political art statements from the artists, as much of the Albanian contemporary art that reflects our situation is, but how would one relate it to a new context like the Israeli one, in which the show is taking place? 

Here I started to draw a parallel between what would conceptually be a similar situation which the art works presented and the basis upon which Albanian artists are operating. What most of the work from the artists in this group deal with are the new problems that are born in an in-between space, a space which is created by and in the tension of a cultural clash, a phenomena that fully belongs to our contemporary society. Thus I considered these works as a quest towards giving voice and shape to what seems to be an unresolved problem, that of acceptance and reception of mutual cultural backgrounds – thus in a way the quest for the missing link that in a reduced concept could be coined as ”harmony”. ”Harmony” as a political concept is already the common place, a banal issue, but indeed expresses some kind of projected desire of every side, obviously for different ends. Still it resembles a lot to a Utopian construction and therefore remains like some kind of challenge. 

On the other hand, this idea thrilled me a lot, when I thought of it in the Israeli context. Knowing the situation from several viewpoints, through which I had been going during my years at school in communism, and then through the mediated construction of TV reality, as you see it on the news, the cliche of ”harmony” turned out to be the perfect meeting point, as a concept, or even as a cliche if you like, that could be read and understood more easily. 

”Skinheads Swimming” is thus a multilayered kind of work, that bears with it a paradigmatic approach that can be read in many different ways. When entering the space, the viewer is confronted with a huge projection of a marvelous place, the Fontana di Trevi in Rome, very well known for many reasons. The second moment one realizes that there’s people in the fountain, and immediately the association with Felini’s ”Dolce Vita” is made. And indeed the artist’s intention is to create that association, in order to crash it badly when the camera zooms in. What you recognize in these people in the water, is the image of a skinhead, the symbol of intolerance, a social phenomena recycled or born as a response to the non-acceptance of the other. But as the action evolves, the viewer is endorsed by a sweet feeling of tenderness. The skinheads only act as a very romantic normal couple, kissing and hugging each other while swimming in the clear waters of Fontana di Trevi. 

This is Sislej Xhafa’s work that relies on a continuous friction between cultures; it needs conflicts and negotiations. In fact, Xhafa’s art has become like an exercise in turning weaknesses into strengths: he draws from the controversial imagery associated with his culture, in order to compose a portrait of the artist as a clandestine. All his interventions are carried out with the violence of a criminal act, piling up poor materials such as wood and newspapers, or on the other hand, mixing cheap jewelry and expensive furniture in a crass imitation of a wealthy, gangster-like lifestyle. As a perfect clandestine, Xhafa doesn’t possess any language that he can claim, but he can easily move from one context to another, working in the background, contaminating styles and idioms: photos, videos, objects and performances can all become part of Xhafa’s complex and often gigantic installations, or they can be used in a more discrete way, on the verge of the invisible, when the artist decides to disappear and mingle with reality. 

Consider the work, ’Kanagjeci.’ While Xhafa tries to transform negative stereotypes into a new form of the urban guerrilla, Erzen Shkololli, one of the youngest and most interesting artists still active in Kosova, works with the local rituals and folklore. Shkololli acts as a sort of instinctive and biased anthropologist: he re-enacts traditional ceremonies, while alluding to contemporary symbols and disillusions. It’s this indecision between past and present that makes Shkololli’s work a typical example of what it means to work in the Balkans today: we suffer from a tragic form of ideological strabismus, and we are lost between tradition and modernity, remembrance and hope, freedom and death. That’s a possible reading of Erzen’s video ’Kanagjeci,’ which seems to be some kind of readymade that the artist is putting in front of us, juxtaposing thus two different ways of perception of reality: tradition and contemporaneity, in a society that tries to comply with both of them, while they seem to reject one another. 

’Nocturnes’ by Anri Sala on the other hand, belongs to a generation of young artists that received their education after the change of the political system in Albania: a generation that grew up in a communist country and, all of a sudden, experienced the trauma of capitalism without even enjoying its advantages. From this ideological schizophrenia, Anri Sala has learnt to push the language of documentary to its radical conclusions, working on the borders between reality and absurdity. 

His work ’Nocturnes’ is a metaphor for the Balkan situation, as narrated by a mercenary and by an obsessive collector of fish and aquariums: without ever directly mentioning the words Bosnia, Albania, or Serbia, the two characters talk about cruelty and borders, animals and human beings, killing and surviving. In their descriptions, history and geography become slippery territories, bound to endless negotiations: a perennial struggle between truth and desire, fiction and autobiography. 

Adrian Paci is an artist that started to pave his way on the European contemporary art scene with works that were very much based on social narrative. In the video ’Apparition,’ on one side of a double projection, there’s the picture of a group of elders that very much resembles a family portrait from some strange Renaissance period. The contrast is made when one observes the frustration of this group in front of the camera, and their longing for the little angelic creature, their ness, that appears in front of them, high up on the wall. Everybody is watching the little girl’s lips, when she sings to them, and one can deeply experience their anxiety waiting for their turn to sing back to her, even if just virtually. 

Indeed, after the first emotional contact, this video piece offers more than that, and raises essential important questions on the relationships that stand on the basis of socio-political transformations of post-communist Albania. For the group of elderly, the song of ’hairy ship and little lamb,’ is more than just a song, it’s almost an anthem, part of their identity and culture. It’s more than just a simple song, because it’s related to dozens of memories of a past time, of their childhood, or that of their children, it’s a sort of code that helps understand the culture where they come from and to whom they belong. But what can we say in little Tea’s case though? What can she do with this song and to what extend shall it be part of her culture and education, and more over, what shall be the role and importance of cultural tradition of her country in a wider context for her? Watching her sing, one gets the impression that she’s singing a text relatively abstract to her. The distance between the two projected images, or put in other words, the void in between them becomes a relevant signifier, far more important than the images themselves. It is because it suggests the unavoidable ever-growing distance between her and her grandparents. The only common line (besides the blood connection between them) can be traced in the sound track, the same passing from one image to the other. But for how long shall this be the case? After several years (according to a rule that doesn’t accept exceptions), many of those chairs on the wall in front of Tea shall be empty. After some more years, she shall find herself seated in one of those, waiting impatiently for the appearance of her little ness. I wonder what song shall she sing then? 

In the years to come and in his following projects, the work of Beqiri takes a stronger twist towards dealing with the most obscure sides of human nature, though always related to war crimes. His work is very direct and extremely shocking to the viewer. The artist deliberately aims at challenging the limits of human behavior in front of extreme situations, by showing real acts of executions. In his video-performance project, ’Milka’ produced immediately after the end of the war in Kosova, Beqiri deals precisely with the topics of violence and war crimes. Through a direct gesture of irony the artist dressed up as an army commander, leads his toy-soldier army on a virtual battle on the gallery floor, while in the background some incredibly unbearable images of cows being butchered at point blank with sharp daggers are visible, making the viewer shiver at their sight. It’s really hard for someone to stand such images till the very end, and the timely introduction of the Happy Cow wrapped up in the famous Milka chocolate label is an even more merciless view in what appears to be not only a protest against the war and crimes. 

Born in Peja in 1964, Sokol Beqiri is one of the key figures of this generation of artists, bringing along a new approach to art practices in Kosova, until recently arched in traditionalism and academism. The kind of reality he reflects in his works is dirty, aggressive, submerging, oppressive and almost without a way out. 

The display of human cruelty reaches its maximum on another project entitled ’When the Angels are Late.’ Confronted with a nice, large baroque painting, depicting the angel holding Abraham’s hand while offering his son to God, the viewer can hear the sound of a human plea, a cry, followed by some unclear noise. At eye level, a spy-hole’s been put in the image on the middle. If one dares to look through, the videotaped image shows the real time execution of a young man, his throat being cut with a knife. It’s a freezing image, no one can really stand it. The limit has been pushed too far. It’s not any more some kind of protest against the war and the crimes. It touches the deepest, diabolic, darkest nature of humankind. 

Being the youngest artist of this group, Gentian Shkurti’s ’Go West’ is more based on a funny use of a computer game toy which is much closer to his generation. Using sharp irony on the mediated constructed imagery of Albania and Albanians, Shkurti creates an interactive video game, meant to be played by the viewer, asking thus not only for his interaction, but for his involvement. It is an involvement, because the aesthetics and the function of such a thing as a video game requires it from the viewer/user; when you play it you’re not a passive receiver anymore, but you become an active performer of whatever act is offered to you through the game. It is upon these preconceptions of the medium that Shkurti constructs his intervention, by using such a delicate subject as the clandestine traffic towards Italy, taking place for many years on the Albanian shores. But on the other hand he’s not simply re-staging a narrative situation, but is changing it by offering you the challenge to play and win the game, and thus have fun and enjoy it, but at the same time questioning a whole constructed, or manipulated mentality if you like. ’Go West’ is a paradigmatic title that plays with cliches in many layers, touching upon many perceptions, addressed to any possible side involved in the process. 

These works thus bear witness to a wide range of social textures and all the problems interwoven in those textures, that contemporary society has to deal with. They thus propose a 
critical sweet Utopia, through a bitter reality. This process does not claim the ultimate change of human conditions, however, but is rather offering us a chance to take our time with one of the biggest problems we’re faced with today – that of understanding each other. 

Edi Muka

 The CDA's archives are operating with the support of the Ostrovsky Family Fund and Artis
 

 The CDA's archives are operating with the support of the Ostrovsky Family Fund and Artis