Alketa Ramaj wins six-week artist-in-residence in New York

TIRANA, June 20 – Alketa Ramaj has been announced the winner of the Ardhje (Arrival) artist-in-residence award organized by the Tirana Institute of Contemporary Art (TICA). In a ceremony held on Wednesday at the Tirana express art gallery, Ramaj won a six-week artist-in-residency in New York for her Untitled intimate video of a couple.
Last February, Alketa Ramaj was also announced the winner of the 19th edition of the Onufri visual arts competition.
Alketa Ramaj participated in the exhibition with a picture featuring a leaning tree being held by a metallic structure and a similar gypsum sculpture featuring a structure to hold a sapling straight.
In the TICA 2013 artist-in-residence Award, Ramaj introduced the public with her recent video project Untitled. 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.
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. Four other artists participated in the TICA Award.
Tirana-based Endri Dani focused on a recent project series entitled Palimpsests, that up to date includes 6 pieces. Palimpsests reflect above all the artists’ ongoing research into the material remains of recent history; objects that appear out of use or that have been subjected to radical replacement and adaptations, both in form and meaning.
Italy-based, Albanian artist Klodian Deda presented a selection of works that take the idea of recycling as a starting point for an investigation into “human waste” both in a good and bad sense. “The problem of pollution here becomes a problem of the human being at large, nature’s most violent decoration.”
Tirana-based Matilda Odobashi offered a revision of her long occupation with the relationship between the human and space. Her series of paintings (The building No1; The building No2; The path) provoke a somber coexistence of intimacy and malaise. Depicting human standstills and free-falls in cryptic spatial environments, the works verge on abstraction, whilst exposing a variety of narratives and possible continuations of the “story.”
France-based Albanian artists Ivi Topp competed with the “Eternal Flame” installation presented for the first time in Albania in the context of these years Ardhje Award 2013. Topp offered to the public an exploration into “random chance”. “In nearly complete darkness, a glass pyramid provides the only source of light and sound – in the centre of it a flickering light, water splashing, discrete vibrations.”