TICA announces residency artists

TIRANA, April 4 – The Tirana Institute of Contemporary Art (TICA) has announced the participating artists of its new residency program, T.I.C.A. AIRLAB 2012, a production oriented thematic Artist in Residency Program to be held during April-May and September-October of each year in Tirana. The theme of the AIRLAB for 2012 is Re-enactment as Artistic Strategy and the invited artists to attend the first period starting from April 1st are Serbia’s Vahida Ramujkic, Albania’s Armando Lulaj,and Kosovo’s Astrit.
The AIR LAB consists of a re-worked profile of the existing artist in residency program of TICA. Through the generous support of Princ Claus Culturfund, and as part of the Network Partnership grant of the foundation, TICA AIRLAB will be able to organize two residency periods per year, for a period of three years. The residencies will be thematic, with a different theme to be explored every year. The residencies will also be multidisciplinary, with a focus on contemporary art but extending to other forms of expression, including theater, music, performance and architecture. Two other novelties within AIRLAB are the sending of one Albanian artist at a residency abroad, and a yearly digital publication, with documentation of the works and theoretical contributions on the yearly theme of the residency.
The strategy of re-enactment is an artistic approach that one encounters often in contemporary art. The idea of re-enactment one can say permeates to a certain extent the artistic operation all along the history of art, but a shift in perspective occurs in contemporary art: events are re-enacted not for the mere sake of commemoration, but for the relevance of the past event for the current situation. Furthermore, we can encounter re-enactments of not only historical events, but also of art works and actions done by other artists in the past, or even artists re-enacting their own work or actions. Thus one can say that through reaching back to historical events that have left a trace, or to historical circumstances that inspired creation of certain art works, artistic re-enactment is a way to question our present times through direct engagement not only of the artists but often of the audience as well.
It is precisely this idea of Re-Enactment, this repetition with a difference that will produce something new that constitutes the focus of TICA AIRLAB for the year 2012. The residency program will host artists that are working along these lines, using re-enactment as their artistic strategy, willing to experiment with a context overlap, using the Albanian situation as an active background for the translation of their work.