Four artists conclude TICA residency

TIRANA, Nov. 6 – Four international contemporary have showcased their works at an exhibition as part of an artist-in-residence by the Tirana Institute of Contemporary Art.
Based on her early school period story in Soviet Georgia during the 80s, Georgian artist Tatia Skhirtladze re-enacted in her “00001985” project the game of collecting and gambling with the post stamps. By documenting through photography the circumstances and the narration of it, the artist went back in that period when the post stamps were the first piece of evidence the artist had on a country called Shqiperia (Albania).
In collaboration with Thimi Nika, an Albanian art collector and philatelist as well editor of the book “100 years history of Albanian stamps” a small printed edition of the post stamps was released as an artistic evidence of this narration.
Serb artist Sasa Tkasenko brought for this exhibition “Under Control,” a two-channel video installation as documentation of the real time installation situated in National Historical Museum in Tirana earlier this October (2014).
Albania’s Jonida Beqo/Gypsee Yo performed for the first time” Body of evidence” with a text of her own and music & sound by Mardit Lleshi. The two-channel video directed by Ergys Meta was installed in the same room of the performance “embracing” her in both sides shaping this way a four- act video performance as an intensive reflection on a “rural Albanian story” which came to light because of a crime taking place two years ago in a small village, less than an hour away from the capital of the country, Tirana.
Macedonian author Filip Jovanovski, referring to Brecht’s play “Mother Courage and her children” undertook personal research in collaboration with Ivana Vaseva in order to understand the historical “truth” about the relationship between artists and political systems in Albania and Macedonia, his home country. “Mother Olympia courage and her children” is a series of fourteen oil in canvas paintings, created by the Albanian artist Theodhoraq Napoloni. Combined with text in a two-dimensional installation, they give voice to the conversation of the artist with his own mother and the “ideological mother monuments” of Albania and Macedonia.