On Tuesday 30 June, ZETA Gallery in Tirana will open a new exhibit, entitled “HETEROTOPIAS OF RESISTANCE”.
The show will feature the works of seven artists from four neighbouring Western Balkan countries.
Curated by Blerta Hocia, the exhibition is the result of research conducted by the artists during a residency programme in Tirana, called “Resistance.” This was organised by ZETA and supported by the Swiss Cultural Fund in Albania (SCFA), a part of the Swiss Agency for Development and Coordination.
The official blurb for the exhibition notes that:
“The decisions made in order to contain the spread of the pandemic also led to the increase of human rights violations. The power exerted on the assortment of their transgressions seemed to be continuously perpetuated by justifying itself. New places of existence and resistance were born in order to oppose the absolute submission to control. These places function similarly to Michel Foucault’s heterotopias in his 1967 essay “Of Other Spaces”:
“Their role is to create a space that is other, another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill-constructed, and jumbled. This latter type would be the heterotopia, not of illusion, but of compensation, and I wonder if certain colonies have not functioned somewhat in this manner.”
This parallelism with the colonies of former civilizations, which have been constructed as a result of the necessity to create a new world, a new place, reappears in the re-adaptation of the imagining and the designing of the Web, with social media and other countless online platforms. They act precisely as heterotopias of a simultaneously real and virtual compensation, as an infinite mirror, the particles of which reflect the multiplied instant of life in real-time.”
Artists who will display their work include Darko VuKic, Natasha Nedelkova, Edona Kryeziu, Lori Lako, Fatlum Doci, Nikolche Slaveski, and Nina Galic.
The exhibition starts at 18:00 on Tuesday and admission is free.
