TIRANA, Oct. 8 – Seven Albanian artists have been selected to participate in the Onufri competition, Albania’s most important visual art competition, which in this year’s 21st edition will also feature renowned artists such as Yoko Ono, the Japanese multimedia artist, the widow of famous rock star John Lenon.
“The 21st edition of the Onufri competition has just concluded its stage of selecting the participant artists. The National Art Gallery and the curators have made a very good selection with a combination of foreign artists who have been invited and shortlisted and young Albanian artists,” says Artan Shabani, the director of the National Art Gallery.
The selection of the artists comes after a German-Italian artist duo was announced as the winning curators of this year’s Onufri competition.
VestAndPage was selected for their Sio2 curatorial platform “The reason of Fragility, contemporary artists facing glass” which the jury said has a universal and phenomenological spirit and overcomes the local condition or temporary transition period by especially focusing on the fragility of human relations both with each other as well as the environment around.
The duo known as VestAndPage is composed by German artist Verena Stenke and Venetian artist and writer Andrea Pagnes who have been working together since 2006, generating art in the mediums of live performance, filmmaking and writing, and as independent curators.
The seven Albanian artists, selected out of a total of 29 applications from Albania and Kosovo include Eros Dibra, Shqipe Jonuzi, Sead Kazanxhiu, Ermela Teli, Klodian Deda and artist duo Ermal Babci and Linda Doci.
Sixteen international artists, among whom Yoko Ono and New York-based Serbian performance artist Marina Abramovic have been invited to participate in the Onufri competition. Armando Lulaj, who is representing Albania in this year’s 56th edition of the Venice Biennale with the “Albanian Trilogy: A Series of Devious Stratagems” project is also part of the list of the invited artists.
The curators say the artists were selected for the critical engagement with a visual art and consumerist culture which is rapidly changing and raising questions and confirming the important changes in the private, social and political spheres through a clear artistic and conceptual assessment of the proposed concept, the glass, to explore understandings and interpretations of the work of art in itself.
The exhibition is scheduled to remain open at the National Art Gallery in Tirana from November 20 to January 3, 2016 when the competition’s winners are announced.
The Culture Ministry says last year’s absence of the Onufri exhibition was “a moment of reflection on the 20-year progress of the event with curators, artists and critics to coordinate energy on what has happened and what’s going to come.”
Back in 2013, Berlin-based Albanian artist Silva Agostini was announced the winner of the Onufri international visual arts competition with her “Red in common” video exploring the human body and the skin dividing the inner and outer part.
Praise of Doubt, proposed by Italian curator Claudio Cravero for the last edition of the Onufri Prize, investigated some of the new artistic practices and areas of research, demonstrating their links to today’s changeable political situation, as a mirror of the constant doubt. In the selected artworks, doubt emerged as something that inevitably affects everybody.
The visual arts competition is named after Onufri, a mid-16th century Arch-priest who was the most important painter of icons and murals of the early post-Byzantine era in Albania. His works influenced by the northern Greek painting of the Paleologus age, the Cretan School and western Gothic art can be seen in many churches in central Albania in Greece and in particular at the Onufri museum in Berat which was opened in 1986. Characteristic of Onufri’s works are strong colors, especially reds. Onufri’s two sons, Joan and Nikolla, were also icon painters of note.
