56th Venice Biennale
Pavilion of the Republic of Kosovo
Flaka Haliti
Speculating on the Blue
Curator: Nicolaus Schafhausen
Deputy Curator: Katharina Schendl
Arsenale Artiglierie
Calle Della Tan
2169/f Castello
The skeletons of barrier-like objects that occupy the exhibition space are a reference to the aesthetics of the concrete walls that are erected between nations and regions as a materialization of conflict. Haliti’s installation aims at de-militarizing and de-contextualizing this specific aesthetic regime by stripping the columns down to their material essence and juxtaposing them with elements that are by nature resistant to the concept of borders. In this scenario, the horizon and the blue pictorial ground create a counter image to the concept of borders and function as a tool to raise new perspectives. The interplay of the elements and the different images they generate is the artist’s method for creating an intermediate space that allows for the subjective experience of viewers engaging with her work.
Her approach is one of recontextualizing global politics through disconnection from its regime of appearance. The metaphor of the horizon, simultaneously emblem of possibility and enigma of our limitations is woven into the fabric of our past and present. By drawing on the universal meaning of this metaphor, the artist removes the image economy of the horizon from any specific spatial-temporal context and speculates on its validity as an eternal truth.
With Speculating on the Blue, Flaka Haliti positions the observer in an intermediate space that oscillates between expansion and confinement, proximity and distance; a space that opens up multiple temporal dimensions simultaneously and as a result is experienced as a work of constant actualization.
Flaka Haliti (born 1982 in Prishtina, Kosovo) lives and works in Prishtina and Munich.
Flaka Haliti is not interested in the recent debate on the political per se. She avoids and escapes the fashionable. Her credo goes more like: less political to be more political. Haliti performs this gesture smartly, being fully aware and understanding the sensitive and complex nature of setting herself apart from a previous, male-dominated generation in Kosovo, which primarily aimed for European integration in the sense of a deep and somewhat ironic longing for the West. Her work neither questions nor does it provoke in a blunt fashion. Rather, she responds to provocation and existing realities without an underlying or superimposed ambition to provoke: less irony – more easy.
Markus Miessen
Image: Flaka Haliti, I see a face. Do you see a face. #06, 2014. Digital photograph, edited, mounted on PVC-Forex board, 85 x 100 cm. Courtesy of the Artist