Erëmirë Krasniqi

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  picks January 18, 2023

  Driton Selmani

  Driton Selmani’s site-specific interventions, drawings, and typographic sculptures incorporate simplified figuration, vivid colors, and text to express aspects of his everyday experience, from his personal life to popular culture and politics.

  This exhibition takes its title from Selmani’s site-specific work The Barking of the Clouds Does Not Hurt the Dogs, 2022, a riff on both Charles Baudelaire and a Berber proverb. Installed on the roof of the museum’s atrium, the typographic sculpture is set against the sky above a pile of broken glass. The ever-shifting cloudscape provides a context and

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  print November 2022

  Manifesta 14 Prishtina

  This past summer, the fourteenth edition of Manifesta, the nomadic European biennial, unfolded in Kosovo’s capital, Pristina. Stretched out across twenty-five venues, with more than one hundred artists and collectives, the hundred-day biennial—titled “It matters what worlds world worlds: how to tell stories otherwise”—explored multiple modes of collective storytelling. For its “creative mediators,” Catherine Nichols and Carlo Ratti, a central theme was Kosovo’s unsuccessful privatization following the 1998–99 war. The exhibition was housed mostly in the facilities of state-owned enterprises,

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  picks June 10, 2022

  Nora Al-Badri

  For her project Babylonian Vision, 2020, artist Nora Al-Badri sets out to reconstruct and activate a cultural memory of Babylon, however synthetic, using a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). Drawing on a bank of ten thousand images of the Mesopotamian, Neo-Sumerian, and Assyrian artifacts currently kept in the collections of museums across Europe and North America, this artificial-intelligence technology produces a simulation of a looted artifact informed by these actual holdings.

  Digital-born, the artifacts that Al-Badri reconstructs may be artificial, but they offer cultural proximity to

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  picks April 29, 2022

  Blerta Hashani

  Blerta Hashani’s first solo show, “Ambient,” dissects the idyllic rural landscape and reworks it in twenty-seven small-scale paintings. Each composition reduces nature to basic forms and lines, with distilled landscapes comprised of muted tones of brown and blue. Kodër dhe diell (Hill and Sun) (all works cited 2020) incorporates a scrap of a handwritten letter in the shape of a hill. Over the mound, a black sun—an eclipse, perhaps?—hangs in a vast whiteness broken only by a burst of vertical black ink lines at the center-left, allusions to dry twigs, some of nature’s less photogenic features.

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  picks April 14, 2022

  Enkelejd Zonja, Vigan Nimani

  Thirty years after the fall of Communism, Kosovo and Albania continue to wrestle with the legacies of a single-party system. Curator Zef Paci explores these tensions, bringing together an artist from either side of the border—Enkelejd Zonja from Albania and Vigan Nimani from Kosovo—for the exhibition “after party.” While the political systems in their home countries may have differed, the two artists’ works bear thematic similarities. At the entrance to the exhibition, two paintings reconstruct the promise of progress through modern architecture. Zonja’s crimson-skyed oil on canvas The Unnamed

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  print January 2022

  Alban Muja

  Produced over the span of a decade, the fifteen works on display in Alban Muja’s solo show “Whatever Happens, We Will Be Prepared,” curated by Maria Isserlis, surveyed the lasting effects of war and political transition in Kosovo. The exhibition’s title is a phrase heard in the three-channel video installation Family Album, 2019, which was originally shown in the Pavilion of the Republic of Kosovo at the Fifty-Eighth Venice Biennale. To create this work, Muja tracked down and interviewed children from iconic war photographs that circulated in global media during the 1998–99 Kosovo War. Now