FROM THE SERIES UNTITLED
FROM THE SERIES UNTITLED
Artist: Fani Zguro
Exhibition period: 10.02.2022–17.02.2022, 19:00–21:00
CLOSING SOON presents From The Series Untitled, a solo exhibition of Fani Zguro. From The Series Untitled is one element of “Cut-Up (Episode 1)", a multi-part solo exhibition taking place at once across of ten locations in Accademia Albertina Turin, Accademia di Brera Milan, CLOSING SOON Athens, Erratum Milan, National Historical Museum Tirana, National Library of Albania Tirana, Townsend New York, Tegeler Weg Berlin, Tirana Art Center, and Phroom Platform Milan, opening worldwide on February 10, 2022.
“...In the photographs of the work “From the Series Untitled”, Mixed media on printed paper, Variable dimensions, 2016, by Fani Zguro, we see nine images where the faces of one, two, three, four subjects, have been not really deleted, but scratched, cut out, severed, grazed, rubbed off. The photographic image has not been manipulated, it is the photographic surface that has been mutilated. There is something very brutal about it, as if the urgency of changing the existing course of events eliminated all politesse. It is a real decapitation: these are beheaded bodies, not disappeared bodies. The fact that the elimination of the face does not leave behind a smooth photographic surface (which translates as a modified event, that person was never there) but on the contrary what is left is the dramatically dismembered surface: a hole. That person was there and I chopped off her head, and by doing this I revealed the inner mechanisms of photographic representation, a photograph is just a thick paper with a light sensitive surface, nothing more than that, not your family, not your friends, but just paper with photographic emulsion, a light-sensitive colloid consisting of silver halide crystals dispersed in gelatin.
“From the Series Untitled” is the equivalent of a passional crime in photography. A crime.
The disappearance of political rivals and dissidents - to incarcerate them is not enough, to kill them is not enough, it has to be as if they never existed- has immediate associations with dictatorships and totalitarism. But also with failed love affairs, broken marriages, betrayed friendships, disinheritances. Life as a torn photograph, identity removed by scratching faces: memory has been lost, and the loss is irreversible...”
Dora Garcia
Text by Dora Garcia
Text by Clara Meister
Fani Zguro was born in 1977 in Tirana. Lives and works in Tirana and Berlin. Zguro graduated at the Accademia delle Belle Arti di Brera in Milan (1998-2007). In 2007 he won the International Onufri Prize assigned by the National Gallery of Arts in Tirana; in 2016 the International Mulliqi Prize assigned by the National Gallery of Kosovo in Pristina; the Best Video-Art award assigned by TIFF Tirana and in 2021 Award TOP7 Gallery of ArtVilnius21. Zguro curated the 14th International Onufri Prize at National Gallery of Arts in Tirana (2016). In 2017 was part of the AiR program at Q21 - Museums Quartier in Vienna and Cité Internationale des Arts Paris (2003-2004). Since 2015 he is part of apexart’s jury. His work has been shown at Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin, National Museum of Contemporary Art Bucharest, Musée des Civilisations de l’Europe et de la Mediterranée Marseille, Filmoteca Espanola Madrid, Photo Museum Braunschweig, 2nd Tirana Biennale, 3rd Mardin Biennial, 4th Young Artists Biennial of Bucharest, 6th Çanakkale Biennial, 7th Edition of the Black-and-White Biennial in Satu Mare, 13th Biennale of Cairo, Ludwig Museum Budapest, Belvedere 21 - Museum für Zeitgenössische Kunst Vienna, Palais Populaire Berlin, the New York Public Library and Centre Pompidou Paris.
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Photos: Nikos Katsaros
