Opening at 25th of May 5 pm – 9 pm, at Tre Kullat, behind Qemal Stafa Stadium (close to pasticeri Venecia). Open 25th  May to 3rd of June, between 11am-6pm.

TICA’s second Residency Period is coming to an end and will be celebrated with an exhibition featuring works by the Residency artists:

Katarina Lundgren, living/ working in Stockholm, Sweden.
Leonard Qylafi, living/working in Tirana, Albania.
Karl Ingar Roys, living between Oslo, Norway & Berlin, Germany.
Katarina Zdjelar, living/working between Belgrade, Serbia & Rotterdam, Holland.

The Third Face of Power is a work in progress by Katarina Lundgren focusing on expressions and acts of power in Albanian communist propaganda features. I’m interested in how power is depicted and how the fictive plot in these films where used as propaganda to support the existing power structure and to suppress unwanted conflicts. The work is a slideshow installation with photographs of actors and scenery from different films. The project name comes from a academic theory Three Faces of Power, coined by Steven Lukes.

White Lyrics by Leonard Qylafi, we see a video installation with two projections in the same time, filmed at the same place. The difference between the two is the presence of the person in the left and the missing of him in the right. There is a chair at a window where he sits and plays guitar, music composed by the artist. While playing the guitar the light changes and when the music is over he leaves the place. The whole video installation has a strong attraction for the image perception, the music expression as a self language and a meditative poetry.

In the work “Some humans as statues some not” I have photographed random people I have met during my time in Albania. I asked some of them to imagine how the socio-realistic statues of the communist past looked like. The ones that no longer is present in public spaces. Others I just asked to take their picture, without mentioning the past and the statues.  Karl Ingar Roys

For several years Katarina Zdjelar has been engaged on a series of projects that investigate how we deal with language, and how language, as well as being a series of codes that can be decoded and encoded, also represent a series of negotiations between the code of language and the physicality of speech. She is also concerned with the material nature of language; how it shapes our speaking bodies, how it draws us together into communities, how it makes space and clears space away.(extract taken from the text by Steve Rushton)

Everything we want to know, but did not dare to ask is conceived and organized by  TICA, with the support of European Cultural Foundation, Institute of Tirana Biennale, Tirana Town Hall and Moving Culture

Foto nga Ekspozita:

Rezidenca #3 is an exhibition with the participating artists of TICA A.I.R. program for the September – October, 2007 period. During this period, the artists stayed and worked for 2 months in Tirana, realising a number of new projects, investigating different aspects of Albanian society and history, as well as human relations in our global condition. The artists of this residency are: Suela Qoshja(Tirana, Albania), Martin Krenn (Vienna, Austria), and Vigan Nimani (Prishtina, Kosova).

This residency period was part of an exchange project with <rotor>, Graz, and was made possible with the support of the European Cultural Foundation and the Austrian Embassy in Tirana. The exhibition of this residency period is realised in collaboration with the Zeta Gallery, the newest gallery in Tirana, supporting and promoting contemporary art.

About the works:

SUELA QOSHJA - Tirana/Albania, AVENUE OF THE STARS

Eyes are wide open and looking at you in the series “Avenue of the Stars” of Suela Qoshja. In all photographs her eyes are opened and staring at you. It’s this kind of looking of a still image that follows you in every corner of the room or every direction you go. But there’s something specific with her look – she’s looking at you as if she’s trying to predict your next move and the way it will affect her. Dedicated to one of Albania’s worst social plagues of the last 10 years – the trafficking of women – and shot a few days after the artist’s neighbour was trafficked in Germany, the series is a re-appropriation and a mixture of classical standards of “beauty” and a continuous condition of discrimination of a social class –women. Between the elegant leaves of flowers she’s holding and the heavy make up of her face, a subtle critique of “innocence” permeates the whole series.

Untitled
In my work during the residency I have been collaborating with Martin Krenn, an artist from Austria. The questions I raise to him in the video are part of typical “over-the-table” discussions, which are taking place i.e. during a dinner in Albania. In the work, I have been interested to research how communication and creation of a dialogue is constructed differently in different societies.

MARTIN KRENN - Vienna/Austria, TIRANA TOURS

On the second day of my residency I asked at the National Museum to get a book of Tirana in English. I got one - from under the table. It is a kind of Tourist Guide that was published in German/English/French/Albanian in 1990. After the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 Albania was the last country in Europe with a communist system (Until 1992). The book is meant to be a photographic guide where you can visit in Tirana all buildings and attractions of Enver Hoxha and his communist party. It presents a perfect communist town.

I decided to re-photograph the places to look how they changed after 17 Years. For example the former Enver Hoxha Museum has now a sign with „Welcome President Bush“ on its top.

In addition to the photo-series I got the possibility to do a video-interview with the photographer of the original book, Petrit Kumi, from whom I could get additional information about the backgrounds of the production of the book.
My project is investigating the mechanism of ideologic rhetoric and image politics on the example of a book, that was made during the last days of a communist totalitarian regime in Europe. It also shows in a subtle way how neo-liberal capitalism destroyed places that nevertheless of the dictatorship functioned socially and economically well.

One Shot
In a single take, a street scene is documented in which an elderly man, in an unexpected act, becomes the protagonist of the short film. ONE SHOT can be read as a metaphor for the fight (for survival) of the
individual within post-communist society.

VIGAN NIMANI - Prishtina/Kosova, UNTITLED

Balconies, windows, glasses and sky, all appear in the paintings of the “Untitled” series of Vigan Nimani. Painted in a minimalist way, resembling the architecture they depict, the buildings in Nimani’s paintings seem timeless. While one can trace silhouettes of modernist architecture, depicting only fragments of buildings gives them a somewhat utopian, futuristic feeling, while we’re all conscious about the fact that the architectonic reality from which these buildings have been painted doesn’t contain either.

Stripped of human presence, with numerous reflecting glasses and fragments of sky, the buildings in Vigan’s paintings seem to deepen in mystery, while luring our curiosity to identify and discover them.

Photos from the exhibition: