TIRANA, Sept. 2 – Downtown Tirana will be the venue of this year’s sixth edition of Art Kontakt festival featuring dozens of international artists, differently from previous editions when the 19th century Porto Palermo 19th century castle in Vlora served as its host.
“The sixth edition of Contemporary Art Festival “Art Kontakt 2015” comes up with an innovative way where the central subject theme of communication is in interaction with visual arts in other forms of art such as: music, architecture, design, modern dance, etc. The Communication theme in this edition is not a simple conversation between people in a verbal way, but an action or a reaction mode which moves towards a multidimensional approach,” organizers say.
The festival scheduled for 25 to 26 September and targeting exchanges between artists will be preceded a video production workshop scheduled for September 11 to 16.
The communication theme makes this edition an authentic laboratory of exploration where new artists can express themselves and investigate different phenomena such as sociopolitical, ideological, race, religion or even can take the media role which today plays an essential role in the interchange of information worldwide. This edition’s theme is not a simple dialogue between people in a verbal way, but an action or a reaction mode moving towards a multidimensional approach. Simultaneous messages and impulses are sent to the society in need of new and social evolution, made possible through arts as an entity, organizers say.
The selection of the columns in Tirana’s “Italia” square as the place for opening, running and closing the festival is not a coincidence. The wide variety of arts that Art Kontakt festival holds in its DNA make a return of this place to the residents or become a kind of “audientibus humanitatis,” a place where you observe and are being observed, where the public is not only spectator but even protagonist, a common open space where artists, public and artworks meet up. The historical viewpoint of columns transmute along the festival from a place of political symbol in a place for contemporary art. This square, currently released from the ghosts between the two worlds, the fascist past which created and built it, and the post 1990s with its consumerist functions, will serve to stimulate emotion and desire by the artworks. Along the festival, the columns will be transmuted in “Communication” columns through video-art, installations, music, contemporary dance, performances, photography and poems. Communication is not only a theme, but a metaphysic alchemy between the audience and art works rinsing off the sludge of the political myth abusively built upon this square. The confrontation in the name of contemporary art, between the ideological past consciousness which buried the “Communication” as concept and the present mediocrity, is of great courage.
Art Kontakt festival 2015 reunites artists from different countries who with their works return to observe “the Man” but this time highlighting of how and with what He Communicates. “At this point, Art Kontakt festival will supply the missing oxygen to the square and will conceive through the art a new language, a new “Communication” with it, where the visitors will find not only their twisted memoirs but the urban foresight of a city looking towards the future,” say the festival’s organizers.
