TIRANA, Feb, 25 – Alketa Ramaj and Endri Dani are representing Albania in the country’s first ever participation at the fourth “End of the World Biennial” which is taking place in Argentina and Chile.
Young Albanian contemporary artist Alketa Ramaj, a winner of prestigious awards in Albania, is participating with an Untitled video exploring the relationship between a couple.
Reflecting on the relationship of a couple and on what might at first glance appear like a “monotonous cycle” of it, the artist uses a poetic approach, eager to fathom this “monotonous relationship” as an interior conflict of insecurity and silent domination, disclosing of a form of “intimacy” that is not restrained to the surface of the protagonists’ skin.
Meanwhile, Endri Dani is participating with the Star Negative video installation exploring the process of the creation of a souvenir by an Albanian craftsman.
“For the first time the sculptor was working on a new model which was removed from Albanian cultural heritage and would then enter the process of reproduction and marketing. This would be the image of one of the most popular and successful artists in the global music industry, Rihanna. Beyond the documentation of this phenomenon, I am also interested in the mass distribution of this image in the Albanian arts and crafts market,” says the artist.
This year’s theme of the Biennial is “Contrasts and Utopias”, with some 150 international artists exploring cultural and environmental topics with the aim of “creating interdisciplinary spaces for reflection and analysis of contemporary problems”.
This 4th edition is taking place mostly in Argentina, in the cities of Ushuaia in Tierra del Fuego and Mar del Plata (province of Buenos Aires), but will have extensions in Chile, in Valparaiso (Parque Cultural) and Punta Arenas on the Brunswick Peninsula.
Alketa Ramaj is the winner of the 19th edition of the Onufri visual arts competition in 2012. Her Untitled video won her a six-week artist-in-residency in New York in 2013.
Ramaj, 30, lives and work between Tirana and Venice, where she has been studying at Academy of Fine Arts since 2012. Her position as an artist is exemplary for an incessant curiosity and permanent study of new forms of expression, which reveals a striking “independence” in terms of applying her own critical and ambitious working methods. In the past years, the artist has explored a number of different mediums, from photography to video, painting and lately sculpture, organizers say.
Born in Shkodra,Endri Dani, 28, lives and works as an artist and graphic designer in Tirana.
His educational background as a painter permeates his photographs and installations overwhelming the techniques over a number of different mediums (found objects, artefacts of ordinary life, cultural history, souvenirs, etc.). Without any kind of complaints, his research mostly deals with the condition of being an Albanian artist in his land, an issue that concerns quite everybody who lives Albania. Furthermore, the work of Endri Dani underlines in-depth some of the paradoxes of his own country. Just by being inspired by subjects close to him, or stories arising from his everyday life, Endri Dani lets all these insights slide poetically towards a sort of fictional space where everything is possible.
