‘Let us start from the middle’

TIRANA, Sept. 11 – After four years of operating in different places in the city, the Tirana Art Lab is inaugurating its own new facilities with the “Let us start from the middle” exhibition by the Israeli artist duo Effi & Amir showcasing their research project into the world of Google Street View. In this exhibition, they try to develop different approaches of film-making inside an already existing photography. Google Street View offers a parallel reality, already documented. Inside this huge “snapshot of the world”, it seems that all that is left to do, is to reframe it.
“This is obviously a simplistic way to describe a move that is in fact highly challenging both artistically and philosophically. Effi & Amir not only reframe, but they intervene within the pictures of Google Street View, mix them with other footage, and make them tell other stories,” organizers say. Their work questions perception and representation, authorship and appropriation, time and space correlation and it points at the surprising shift in the western concept of mapping – from abstraction to the anecdotic.
“Let us start from the middle” includes three projects, a new video-work titled “The Vanishing Vanishing-Point” and “As If”, five-channel video installation, in collaboration with Albanian and Kosovo artists, which will be exhibited for the first time, as well the results of the workshop, “Tirana Collective Mental mapping” with young people from the city of Tirana.
“The middle” in this case, refers both to the arbitrary character of the world-view that Google street view offers, as well as to questions of centrality, or, on the other hand denial of hierarchy or linearity.
The exhibition engages with the current location where the artists live, the city of Brussels and the city where the exhibition will take place, the city of Tirana. The fictional space of Google Street View becomes a tool that allows them to address issues related to both realities at the same time. It gives them the possibility to critically engage and question power structures both of the European Union and the institutions that represent it and the Google Street View system.
The exhibition will be open at the Tirana Art Lab until Sept. 21 at an apartment in Ymer Kurti street near the Wilson square in Tirana.