For the 35-year-old Tirana-based artist Armando Lulaj, Albanian Trilogy represents the conclusion of many years of research into the period of the Cold War in Albania
TIRANA, April 22 – “Albanian Trilogy: A Series of Devious Strategems” a project by Albanian contemporary artist Armando Lulaj and curated by Italy’s Marco Scotini is ready to represent Albania in the 56th International Art exhibition of the Venice Biennale in 2015.
“A reflection on Albania’s social history, a single narrative corpus articulated over three distinct moments: Albanian Trilogy is a sort of time capsule of the past with strange memorabilia and trophies which presents, contemporaneously, fiction and documentary material,” says the Venice Biennale about the Albanian pavilion which will be displayed from May 9 to November 22, 2015
Combining evocation and documentation, the project concentrates on a historic-political phase that was extremely important for the building of an identity that was not just Albanian but international. On display are three videos and archival materials, as well as an enormous whale’s skeleton, which is both protagonist and silent witness—an incarnation of the giant-Leviathan, the Hobbesian principle of sovereignty.
For the 35-year-old Tirana-based artist Armando Lulaj, Albanian Trilogy represents the conclusion of many years of research into the period of the Cold War in Albania and, in particular, on the relative themes of collective memory and historic experience, brought together in a film trilogy in which three mythical fetishes symbolize sea, air and land.
The first work in this series is It Wears as It Grows (2011), the second piece of the trilogy is the well-known project NEVER (2012), while the third video, Recapitulation (2015) was created specifically for the 2015 Venice Biennale. Lulaj’s work plays, above all, on the lapses in history: as the curator, Marco Scotini, states: “it reveals a friable terrain where one expects to find potent and unmovable representations.”
In Albanian Trilogy, Lulaj’s artistic research into the specters of socialism and Scotini’s curatorial research on the politics of memory arrive at an important common result.
“The project was selected for its full and detailed presentation, its intelligence and conceptual force, relationship with the Albanian history and in the meantime the global history, the complex internal structure, the clarity of the curatorial vision and the support by other donors,” said the international jury headed by German art critic Boris Groys last October when Lulaj was selected to represent Albania at the Venice Biennale.
Some 53 countries will be participating in the 56th exhibition, which will take place from May 9 to November 22, 2015 at the Giardini and at the Arsenale and in various other venues in Venice. The title chosen by curator Okwui Enwezor for the 56th International Art Exhibition is “All the World’s Futures”
