Genti Korini

Opens Saturday, May 9

The Albanian Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale presents A Place in the Sun, a moving-image installation by Albanian artist Genti Korini, curated by Polish curator and art critic Małgorzata Ludwisiak.

Within the three-channel video work, live acting, puppetry, animation and an original sonic score converge to form a fictional theater staged in Zaum—a transrational experimental language developed by Russian Futurist poets in the early 20th century. Zaum was created as a “pure language” without any grammar and syntax rules, meant to decompose the social order. The artist uses the irrationality of Zaum to take the viewer to the limits of language, and beyond the possibility of communication, to allow them to create a space where anything can be said anew.

On the one hand, the exhibition diagnoses Albania as a “somewhere place,” invariably defined by external and internal projections about it. On the other hand, it becomes a poetic expression of all invisible cultures, minor languages, and the unknown. The main point of reference for the artist is a Bloodless Murder magazine and its “Albanian Issue” (1916), published by an avant-garde group based in Petrograd (today Saint Petersburg). This magazine satirized the nationalistic and imperial pretensions of pre-revolutionary Russia, portraying Albania through a prism of exoticism and orientalist fantasy. Within the colonial gaze presented in Albanian Issue, Albania emerges simultaneously as a romanticized frontier and as a stage for civilizational hierarchies, revealing more about the anxieties and ambitions of its foreign observers than about the country itself.

Genti Korini’s paintings, videos, objects and photographs, as well as his latest film, Spider’s Envy, presented at Manifesta 14 (2022), revolve around the history of Albania and its relationship to modernity, its past and present-day heritage, and the tensions between reality and fiction, less as fixed narratives than as unstable conditions. This project is a continuation of Genti Korini's longstanding interests in cultural identities and their complex manifestations. Korini links the disquiet of the present and projections about the unknown to the unsettled dreams of a century ago, when borders, languages, and identities were in flux. A Place in the Sun becomes a speculative stage where history, fantasy, and ideological imagination overlap.

Commissioner: Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Sport

Curator: Małgorzata Ludwisiak