Germany, Kucana’s adopted new country, gave him the opportunity to form his new artistic identity.
TIRANA, Dec. 15 – Albania born, Germany-based artist Arben Kucana has returned home with a new project featuring a set of photos and installations. The ‘World of Light” exhibition, scheduled for Dec. 19 to 26 in the National Art Gallery garden, where a single-room house set up as part of the Austrian Cultural Week last month, will also host Kucana’s exhibition which this time comes as Christmas present for Albanian art lovers.
The single-room house , a temporary, flexible exhibition concept, created by Philipp Morlock brought together artists from Austria, Albania, France and Germany celebrating the 2011 Austrian Cultural Week in Tirana from Nov. 5 to 13. As the name suggests the house, has one room and a simple roof form that is used for weather protection. It represents a refuge, a sanctuary, a place where you can keep something safe.
The “World of Light’ is Kucana’s second event for this year in Albania. In early 2011, the German embassy in Tirana hosted a solo painting exhibition of the artist who has been living in Germany for the past 20 years.
In the German Embassy premises in March 2011, Kucana “WAYS” exhibition explored the artist’s creative path as a bilateral relationship between the Albanian and German culture.
“Roads that connect, split, tremble, as in a giant mazeŠWays they start and never arrive! Circuits that connect to each other and to stand alone yet. All in a fixed relationship to each other as the infinite dimension of time in which we live.”
Born in 1967 in Tirana, Arben Kucana grew up and very soon he discovers his love and devotion to art. His new perspective began on 2 July 1990, when he went in as a refugee at the German Embassy in Tirana in search of a free world and also as a rebellion against the communist regime.
Germany his adopted new country, gave Kucana the opportunity to form his new artistic identity.
His past in Albania and the present in Germany live together in the artistic consciousness of Arben Kucana and make him a very special artist. He paints pictures of different life ways, ways they start and never end but in emotional stories, impressions, dreams and realities remember.
