TIRANA, May 20 – A German-Italian artist duo has been announced as the winning curators of the 21st edition of the Onufri competition, Albania’s most important visual arts event beating two other applications from a Dutch-Kosovo duo and Slovakia, organizers announced this week.
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.
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 VestAndPage proposal also offers a unique interaction opportunity between Albanian artists and some of the most renowned contemporary artists. Their extensive experience in complex, multimedia and multicultural events offers guarantee for the best implementation of this in situ exhibition as well as its coverage and promotion in national and international contemporary art stage and media,” said the organizing council of the Onufri exhibition composed of five renowned local artists.
VestAndPage‘s works have been produced and presented internationally in a variety of sites, museums and galleries, and have been described as transfixing, confronting, spellbinding, humble, uncomfortable, carrying fresh iconography, cathartic, visceral, liminal, otherworldly, shamanic, tensional, silent, delicate or mysterious.
The Netherland’s Vincent W.J van Gerven Oei and Kosovo’s Hana Qena and Slovakia’s Lydia Pribisova had also submitted projects to curate the Onufri exhibition.
The National Art Gallery, which is the organizer of this most important visual arts event in Albania, says the 21st edition of the Onufri exhibition will be held in November-December 2015. 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.
