INFRARED Exhibition: Given
Curator: Blerta Hoçia
Participating artists: Abi Shehu, Berat Bajrami, Bib Frrokaj, Bobb Attard, Laureta Hajrullahu, Lori Lako, Lumturie Krasniqi, Yll Xhaferi
Given: 1) The fenced area, 2) The weeds * – A small oasis of shrubs and herbs, the only ones that can resist the advanced degradation of this piece of city turned into nature.
It is in the nature of concrete to reveal the human and in the nature of herbs to grow everywhere. A new ecosystem created within this neglected bubble, waiting to become fruitful again in the urban metamorphoses. The long wait has resulted in some red bricks randomly compacted with each other, a bare wall that changes hue, pink, mint in pebbles and dirty white.
If we could see the earth outside of human influence, this small place could represent an idea of the macrocosm of reality, as if it were a frozen space-time in the thousands of years of human development history, hiding from the beginning the potential of self-destructive human. Its toxic traces are documented throughout the current geological era where the anthropocentric vision for the environment and the terrestrial prevails.
A vision of nature as something foreign, outside the self. As something that can be domesticated according to arrogance. Anything that is not human can be in the service of human benefit. Is nature something given? Is nature a concept invented by humans, and consequently everything in it exists only in the form of human perception excluding its being an independent entity?
“The ecological value of the term nature is dangerously overrated , because Nature isn‘t just a term – it‘s something that happened to human-built space, demarcating human systems from Earth systems. Nature as such is a twelve-thousand-year-old human product, geological as well as discursive.” (T.M Dark Ecology). As the philosopher Timothy Morton argues in Dark Ecology, nature thus understood, expresses an agrologistic approach to living, and consequently results in a view that excludes all views that are not human. Well, the weeds or shrubs mentioned above exist only in the dimension of our perception on these herbs or these shrubs. The agrologistic vision is the same of the first people who turned from gatherer- hunters to farmers – agronomists.
Human for human is a self-destructive formula. The vision we have of nature is that of boundaries, and the preferred way of existence of this system is to domesticate every non-human life forms, deepening the dividing line between humans and nature.
“Nature is best imagined as feudal societies imagined it, a pleasingly harmonious periodic cycling embodied in the cycle of the seasons, enabling regular, anxiety-free prediction of the future.” (T.M 2016).
But this supposed lack of anxiety, its denial, is paradoxically what makes it (anxiety) ubiquitous in modern societies. The given nature carries within itself the ambiguity of the term, human nature, the nature of earth, the unnatural nature and so on. What is given resembles a mass of information which adds to the confusion. In the exhibited works they take the form of utopian or dystopian imaginations by exploring what is given and where it stands, the exact coordinates of the concept of nature. Clearly the title is a reference to the mysterious work of Duchamp Étant donnés: 1 ° La chute d’eau / 2 ° Le gaz d’éclairage, where through data 1) and 2) it is required to elaborate and discover an equation by transforming the visitor to a voyeur who sees the work through peepholes installed in it.
Turning into voyeur in the face of problems (data disclosure or equation discovery) is also characteristic and an integral part of our reality. And then the solitary gesture of the Duchamp visitor is multiplied and repeated in the endless loop of contemporary redeemed living. A familiar and foreign gesture at the same time, performed with anxiety in the cyclicality of the voyeuristic gaze towards ecological catastrophe.
* Given: 1. The Waterfall , 2. The Illuminating Gas, Marcel Duchamp 1946-1966
The second edition of INFRARED addresses pressing environmental issues by using art as a form to tackle these issues. Artists from Kosovo, Albania and Malta were part of Art Residency where they developed concepts and art works that can be seen in the INFRARED Exhibition.
The Exhibition will be open for three days 8–9-10 December 2020, from 11:00– 18:00.
Location: St. Migjeni, no. 17, Prishtina (open air cinema of Kino Rinia)
