T.I.C.A SPRING AIRLAB EXHIBITION 2019
4 September 2019
TICA – Tirana Institute of Contemporary Art and Zeta Center for Contemporary Art present the exhibition of the artists in residency program TICA SPRING AIRLAB 2019. The participating artists, Altin Krasniqi, Blerta Hoçia dhe Donika Çina have developed their artistic research during a two-month long period in Tirana. The exhibition display the results of their respective researches, in which they investigate themes relating to the city, the inner psychological world of the individual and issues of perception and reality through the spectrum of memory.
AIRLAB 2019, is organized by TICA in collaboration with Zeta Center for Contemporary Art and is supported by the Ministry of Culture of Albania.
About artists:
Altin Krasniqi (1994, Kosovo) is an artist living and working in Prishtina, Kosovo. He works mainly with the media of painting, drawing, and installation. He graduated for visual arts and painting at the AAB College, Prishtina (2017). He is the finalist of the Artists of Tomorrow Award (2018), Stacion – Center for Contemporary Art, Prishtina; the winner of the second prize and participant at the URGJENCAT DELIKATE workshop, Cittadellearte, Italy and Art House, Shkodër (2017).
Altin Krasniqi’s work speaks about family history, migration, the economic changes that happened after the war in Kosovo, the social relations and the traces these changes have left in urban architecture and the country’s economy.
Blerta Hoçia (1984 Tirane) is an artist and curator from Albania, living between Tirana and Pristina. She completed her degree in Painting Techniques at the Academy of Florence, Italy.
Previously she was curator at Miza Gallery, an artist-running space in Tirana and the Head of the Archive at Marubi National Museum of Photography. She is an artist with several personal and collective exhibitions. Her solo exhibitions include THE DEMIURGE, Sala Rosa, Siena Italy (2012); IN THE ABSENCE OF EXTERNAL FORCES DO NOT POSSESS MY OWN FORM Magma Florence, Italy (2013) and I THOUGHT OF YOU SO HARD Zeta Galeri, Tirane (2016). She participated in several collective exhibitions and art fairs, among them EMERGENZ, Berlin (2013); SUPERMARKET Stockholm (2015); PARALLEL VIENNA (2017); ARDHJE, Tirane (2014) and MUSLIM MULLIQI PRIZE, Prishtine (2018).
In her artistic practice, she focuses on the creative process of memory, how we deal with it in the intimate and as a society. Her work tends to create an ideal dialogue with the past. She works with personal archives and with digital or analog public archives as well as.
Donika Çina is from Albania. She usually works in the medium of video art, video installation and short movies. She graduated from the Faculty of Visual Art – Multimedia, at the Academy of Arts in Tirana and continued to study photography and video at the University of Arts and Design in Cluj-Napoca, Romania and further in the class of Candice Breitz at the University of Art in Braunschweig, Germany. She has been part of numerous national and international exhibitions and projects like si: DEJEUNER AVEC MARUBI, Curated by Annmarie Turk, Belvedere 21, Vienna, Austri; YLLI ME PESE CEPA, Zeta Gallery, Tirana Albania; IN-BETWEEN, Zeta Gallery, Tirana, Albania;
Donika Çina is interested in how the personal situates itself and deals with society and its collective notions, norms and standards. She especially focuses on moments of decision-making, which she understands as a proposition of taking a standpoint, which reflects or rather derives from not only black and white options. Through the process one develops and confronts questions, which then result in the final result of decision-making. Therefore the process can be regarded as a layering system towards taking a stand. This process is reflected on through the mediatic form used in Donika’s work, hence addressing the viewer’s directly to make their own decisions when encountering her work.