Albania: GENTIAN SHKURTI - alice in worderland

21/05/2007

GENTIAN SHKURTI - alice in worderland

Gentian Shkurti
was born in 1977.

Lives and works in Tirana

video,3.40 min, 1997, DVD

"As Alice says:

In my world everything would be absurd. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn´t. What it is it wouldn’t be and what it wouldn’t be, it would."

"Alice in Wonderland" is a cutting of Walt Disney’s cartoon movie "Alice in Wonderland" and the TV broadcasting of Chaos in Albania during the year 1997.

The video is built like a dialogue of Alice and Wonderland’s door. Alice wants to enter to Wonderland (in this case not the well known one but Albania), where people got guns and shoot in the air wearing masks.

The world of cartoons especially the freshness and delicate beauty of Disney’s one, it s just perfect to evocate a fantastic situation that weirdly matches in a perfect way with something so real, that is violence, but that is often so absurd that can be even ironically harsh.

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albaniavisualart said...: Selected Exhibitions

2007- “FAIRYTALE”, Tirana, Albania

2006- “LIGHT TRAVELLING NOTHING TO LOOSE”, Chelsea Museum, New York

2005- “ VIAGGIO LEGGERO, NIENTE DA PERDERE” Modena, Italy

“CHOSEN PLACES”, Onufri 2004, National Art Gallery,Tirana, Albania (2-nd prize)
“BIENNALE DI ARTI NUOVI”, Ascoli, Italy

“BALCANS, A CROSSROAD TO THE FUTURE”, Arte Fiera, Bologna, Italy

LOCARNO FILMFEST, Locarno, Switzerland
“IN THE GORGES OF THE BALKANS” Kunsthalle Fridericianum Kassel, Germany

“BLOOD AND HONEY”, Sammlung Essl museum, Viena, Austria

“BITTER/SWEET HARMONY”, Digital ArtLab, Holon, Israel

“LOADING”, Galleria Civicia d’Arte Contemporanea Montevergini, Siracusa, Italy

“DIGITAL-IS-NOT-ANALOG”, DINA festival,Campobasso,
Italy

“1-st TIRANA BIENNALE, National Gallery of Arts, Tirana, Albania

“ WHO KILLED BAMBY”, Galerie K& S, Berlin, Germany

2000- “WE LOVE ITALY, ITALY LOVES US”, Museo Civico d’Arte Contemporanea, Ortona, Italy

“PART OF THE SYSTEM”, Rotor Gallery, Graz, Austria

“IN & OUT”, National Art Gallery, Tirana, Albania; 5 June 2007 at 07:27

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CONCEPT

Albania

A New Visual (E)vocation wants to emphasis the interesting new artistic mood in the country trough pieces of art that are strongly connoted by an evocative atmosphere; each one in fact, in different ways, is deeply metaphoric and has in itself the aim of being strongly representative of the reality, but above all it wants to show the real feelings of each artist about the world, especially the country and the society they live in. Even the ones who seem to relate only with their inner inside evocate indeed the fact of being part of a country which is complicated and fascinating at the same time.

Albania can be seen as a ‘virgin’ land, one that has risen and looked with a critical eye over the world of the contemporary art scene indeed because has been out of it for such a long time. A world which so often appears bored with itself, its mechanisms of exploitation and violence, its attempts to defile the simple expressive ability of an image to move, twisting it into some perverse intellectual game.

This exhibition wants to experience its artistic vocation, which tries to evoke the sign of the past but also has a deep hankering after the future. The theme that I propose is simple. The interest is in all the visual arts that are to me, opportune to represent the sensibility of the country: visual Art that looks at Albanian society and its history, that investigates its roots, its memory, the prerogatives of the language, the sense of belonging to a geographic place, the sense of being a depositor of history that is actually changing under the deep mark of fast and heavy globalisation. My aim is to investigate all this trough the sensitive eye of each artist exploring the all around , utilizing the aesthetic approach to the reality with a critical and sharp point of view.

The pieces of art also consider the experiences of separation, going away physically or ideologically from one’s own culture; the interactions, the clutches, the affinities and contrasts between the known and unknown, the influence of myths, its heritage, the conditioning of the national flag; but above all the exibition tries to go deeper into understanding into the real how and why of their artistic production. How can they give new meanings to ideas recollected from a past age or recovered from underneath the cultural conditioning?

My aim is essentially a search and documentation of change trough an evocative sign. The change that comes from distress, from regret; the change that is springing up as a result of new intellectual forces; the changes that result from the popular and the spontaneous; and the change that is coming about as a consequence of contemporary artistic expressions, which desire, above all else, concepts and events in evolution.

TIMES

Preliminary Phase : January to March 2007. Research about the Albanian history of art from the neolitic ceramic to the contemporary visual art, in particular about the latest albanian artists working abroud and the great development that has been given to the visual arts during the last few years either in the public galleries and in the private ones. First Phase: March-May 2007. Staying in Albania, research, finding the artists, keeping and developing the preliminar contacts with albanian public and private institutions. Second Phase: June-July 2007. Art Exibition in Scutari. August-September 2007. Art Exibition in Terni and Milan. Third Phase: Trying to estabilish new work contacts between italian galleries an foundation and the young albanian artists.