Modern & Contemporary Art Exhibitions in Tirana

Visibility is a paradoxical quality. Being seen implies accepted recognition, while unsolicited recognition exploits the scope of being identified. A flashlight beams its glow downwards into a water bottle which holds, and then expands, the capacity of light. Pointed intentionally, the flashlight asserts its gaze. Moving spotlights make space for a center stage, yet by turns produce the same glaring ray that instantly transforms into a medium for surveillance, aggressive and aimed at capture. The conditions under how and which things become visible change. What was meant to illuminate now conceals. A searchlight isolates in order to control. Gazing into the abyss, sheer awareness of a color field elucidates its thrilling spectrum. Red and blue light within peripheral vision are an invitation for an invention of a color that’s not really there to form in the space of the imagination. Magenta’s properties are as ephemeral as the mind that makes it. Its temperament is warmly embracing yet coolly unfazed by the intensity of red and melancholia of blue. A temporary glance reveals it as vivid and vital when it comes from an understanding that true essence is nothing more than the attitude that holds it. No recognition, no identification, no target, no mark. Magenta is radical. No existence on the visible light spectrum or physical wavelength to speak of or to name. Yet despite its nonidentity it can still be seen. Only visible when glimpsed. It might be called magenta but that doesn’t make it a color, or even a description. At most, it is a perceptual hallucination elicited within and by the void. The enigmatic presence of magenta mimics yet challenges the mechanics of visibility when orchestrated as a placeholder, like representation. Representing or being represented means being involuntarily propagated upward or left behind. Magenta proves that what the mind thinks it sees is not objective reality, but rather a structural arrangement made by subjective internal systems invented to make the world legible. Magenta is the imagination surveilling its own visual regime, the leaps it makes and the space it fills, substituting an extraordinary illusion for missed signals proving how much of the world is not as it appears. The freedom promised by visibility comes with the caveat that emancipation does not guarantee agency. As it happens, being recognized in order to be identified turns into becoming objectified. Find a form for invisibility. Linger on that form rather than on the people and places that, by default, occupy the imaginary as socially championed to be politically legible or intelligible, reified and then affirmed as the version of otherness that possesses authentic access to the real. In passport-sized photos, plinth objects substitute for portrait subjects. Together, at varying heights, the physical inter-relationships between these objects transforms them into anonymous subjects. Abstracted by drawing attention to the arranged positions, they find their form, withholding any trace of biography from their reading.

Tirana Art Lab hosts an international residency program that is open to artists, curators and theoreticians from all fields of contemporary culture. The residency gives the participants the opportunity to spend a distinct amount of time in Albania, to meet and to collaborate with artists and experts from the region, and leads to the production of a new work informed by the research on site. The duration of the residency depends on the respective project proposal.