Helidon Gjergji’s first solo exhibition at the National Arts Gallery involves a “a video projection of images brought by Ketevan Geladze, the mother of powerful communist leader of the Soviet Union Joseph Stalin, who has selected some photographs from her family album with a sensibility suitable for social media.
TIRANA, July 29 – New York-based Albanian contemporary artist Helidon Gjergji, who has also represented Albania in the Venice Biennale, is back home this time with a solo exhibition at the National Arts Gallery in Tirana, called “E-mages.”
Gjergji’s first solo exhibition at the National Arts Gallery involves a “a video projection of images brought by Ketevan Geladze, the mother of powerful communist leader of the Soviet Union Joseph Stalin, who has selected some photographs from her family albums (with a sensibility suitable for social media) by elegantly mixing them and accompanying them with a waltz by Shostakovitch conducted by Andrea Rieu.”
The idea conceived by Gjergji as a “hyperreal Russian matryoshka doll” is initially projected on a broken mirror and then reflected in pieces on a wall.”
Helidon Gjergji is an Albanian artist born in Tirana in 1970 and currently living in NYC. Gjergji is known internationally for his reflections about the state of painting and the role that television has adopted in our contemporary society.
In the Albanian Pavilion of the 52nd Venice International Art Exhibition in 2007, he featured an installation composed of eight TV-sets and the area around them, covered by a thin layer of sand, creating a landscape that both recalls and subverts the now iconic arte povera and land art movements.
“My work deals with the illusion of boundaries and discrete identities. In the past, I have worked on the pervasiveness of ideology–both visible, permutated and invisible–in contemporary Western society and the post-Communist world,” says Gjergji.
More recently, he has been creating non-figurative paintings, by abstracting media images. “I have created environments in which the images of live television were reflected and refracted in a variety of ways to produce kaleidoscopic abstract paintings that are meant to dazzle the viewer with their colors while exposing the morphology of television programming.”
