TICA artists in residence in ‘What do you make of this’

TIRANA, Oct. 24 – Artworks created by four Albanian and foreign artists during their TICA AirAlb residency programme will be displayed on Monday, October 28 at the Fab gallery of the University of Arts in Tirana. The “What do you make of this” exhibition by Albania’s Anila Rubiku, Switzerland’s Susanne Sch岠and Peter Spillmann and Austria’s Wendelin Pressl comes after an artist-in-residence programme at the Tirana Institute for Contemporary Art. In the framework of Anila Rubiku’s project “Albania, Women, Justice and the Law” a panel discussion will take place at 7.30pm. Policy makers and civil society actors will discuss the rights and conditions of women and the role of artist as social catalyst.
The Tirana Institute for Contemporary Art (TICA) Residency Program is dedicating its second term of AIRLAB to artists that work with participatory practices as their artistic strategy, in order to introduce new practices and a related discourse in the local scene.
Participatory art – the approach to art-making in which the audience is engaged directly in the creative process, allowing them to become co-authors, editors, and observers of the work – is one of the main developments in contemporary art today. These practices are incomplete without the viewer’s physical interaction, with its main intent to challenge the dominant form of making art.
Participatory art covers a full range of art forms and cross-cuts many different artistic practices. There are participatory film-makers, musicians, drama practitioners, writers, photographers, live-artists, textile artists, print makers, designers, animators, dancers, painters, sculptors and many more. This covers many different approaches that artists take to working with people, ranging from artists holding conversations with members of the public, to artists who undertake long-term workshop programs with groups, or communities.
Having given rise to strong critical positions that greet or problematise them, participatory art practices are almost unknown in the Albanian art scene, organizers say.