FLAKA HALITI - LambdaLambdaLambda

FLAKA HALITI
Thendive, Grace, Rishika, Lefa, Kaden, Victoria, Nadia, Leo, Cyril, Mrs. Faye, Malrar, Josias,
Ojas, Philip, Ernest, Ziyanda, Ledri, Amadou, Bayanda, Julien
(work consisting of 20 sculptures)
Sochima, Edgar, Daniel, Tshego, Nihal, Oyane, Ms. Dagrou, Anna, Abigail, Quentin
(each sculpture is a single work)
2015-2016
Installation consisting of metal, sand, plastic
Dimensions variable
Exhibition view, Ars Viva Prize 2016
Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig
In her installation Flaka Haliti explores questions of identity, escape, migration and mobility. Her bags filled with blue sand refer not only to uprooting but to the loss of possession
associated with leaving home. The blue sand in the yellow bags represents the colors of the
European Union, projected as a place of longing. For Haliti, blue is the color of the horizon
and thus a metaphor for something constantly in mind which may never be reached. Small
wire figures, which emerged after drawings of stick figures, add a human perspective to this
figure of thought.
Abigail
2016
Metal, sand, plastic
appr. 60 x 80 x 160 cm
Edgar
2016
Metal, sand, plastic
appr. 60 x 80 x 160 cm
Luminous Garden (Kopsht Iluminues) #3
2015
Print on Aluminium-Dibond, 70 × 100 cm
Wallpaper, 95 x 205 cm
Luminous Garden (Kopsht Iluminues) #1
2015
Print on Aluminium-Dibond, 70 × 100 cm
Wallpaper, 95 x 205 cm
I See A Face. Do You See A Face.
Exhibition views, Ars Viva Prize 2016
Städtische Galerie Karlsruhe, Karlsruhe, 2015
Exhibition view, I See A Face.Do You See A Face
mumok - Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna, 2014
Flaka Haliti, winner of the Henkel Art-Award 2013, takes an analytical approach to society
and the media in her work, and refers in particular to her own experiences as an interloper
between different countries and cultures. The artist, who was born in 1982, lives and works in
her home city of Priština and also in Munich and Vienna.
By contrasting an installation of imitated concrete walls with a photo series of cloud motifs
including computer-drawn faces, Haliti constructs a spatial scenario that is both menacingly
narrow and constricted and yet also offers an open and broad perspective. A further work
looks at interpersonal relationships between proximity and distance under the conditions of
the media world, in a video installation about long-distance relationships on the internet.
The exhibition title “I See a Face. Do You See a Face.” is taken from the photo series with cloud
motifs and poses a question that is formulated so that it can also be taken as a statement of
fact. In this deliberate dissolution of all clear parameters and ascription, Flaka Haliti emphasizes her interest in initiating games between reality and fiction, and imaginary proximity and
spatial distance.
I See a Face. Do You See a Face. #01
2014
Digital photograph edited mounted
on PVC-Forex board, framed
85 x 100 cm
Ed.3+2AP
I See a Face. Do You See a Face. #02
2014
Digital photograph edited mounted
on PVC-Forex board, framed
85 x 100 cm
Ed.3+2AP
I See a Face. Do You See a Face. #03
2014
Digital photograph edited mounted
on PVC-Forex board, framed
85 x 100 cm
Ed.3+2AP
I See a Face. Do You See a Face. #04
2014
Digital photograph edited mounted
on PVC-Forex board, framed
85 x 100 cm
Ed.3+2AP
I See a Face. Do You See a Face. #05
2014
Digital photograph edited mounted
on PVC-Forex board, framed
85 x 100 cm
Ed.3+2AP
I See a Face. Do You See a Face. #06
2014
Digital photograph edited mounted
on PVC-Forex board, framed
85 x 100 cm
Ed.3+2AP
I See a Face. Do You See a Face. #07
2014
Digital photograph edited mounted
on PVC-Forex board, framed
85 x 100 cm
Ed.3+2AP
I See a Face. Do You See a Face. #08
2014
Digital photograph edited mounted
on PVC-Forex board, framed
85 x 100 cm
Ed.3+2AP
I See a Face. Do You See a Face. #09
2014
Digital photograph edited mounted
on PVC-Forex board, framed
85 x 100 cm
Ed.3+2AP
I See a Face. Do You See a Face. #10
2014
Digital photograph edited mounted
on PVC-Forex board, framed
85 x 100 cm
Ed.3+2AP
I Miss You, I Miss You, till I Don't Miss You Anymore
2012-2014
3-channel Video + Audio, time synchronized
113 min.
Ed.3+2AP
With her video installation I Miss You, I Miss You, Till I Don’t Miss You Anymore Flaka Haliti
looks at an emotion whose objectification or translation by means of language, image, sound,
or choreography has been almost fully colonized by pop culture—love. Imagine uttering “I love
you” and not being catapulted to the dispostive of love and romance as perpetuated during the
Renaissance for example by blazon poetry,1 or today by Hollywood or Bollywood productions
and pop music. Communication about love is essentially intertextual and follows the bricolage
principle. Love is socially and culturally fabricated.
However there is always a certain surplus left, a gap, a failure of a social practice or a norm,
supposed to be fully internalized, inscribed into a body. Or is this malaise of representation? The
representation of love—be it visual, verbal, audio, or bodily translation—therefore always fails.
The failure, the surplus refuses to be medially grasped or translated. This translation functions
thus most often by the ways of a metaphor (tertium comparationis), a synecdoche (standing for,
quantitative relation), or a metonymy (standing for, qualitative relation), so we are always faced
with an obvious distance between the referent and the signified. In the history of art as well as
in contemporary art, love—in translated forms (like body, care, desire, death/mourning, yearning, melancholia, etc.)—has been an often represented motif, however rare works are which
dare(d) to engage with less unmediated representations.
Flaka Haliti’s installation on love points mercilessly to this “lovesickness,” to the problem or
failure of the (re)presentation/translation/communication of love. In the installation the love
discourse is presented in sound by an online tool, a digital translation program into one and the
same universal pop-cultural love language—English. The translated material of the installation
consists of actual love letters exchanged by love couples in long distance relationships. The
lovers and authors of the letters were in pain as they were separated, their subject of desire
was distant, postponed, or lost. Thus Flaka Haliti’s work seems to repeat the representation of
love so omnipresent in the history of art, love as yearning or mourning. Within her installation
it is namely once again articulated as “having love for” and not as “being (in) love.” However, it
is exactly this aspect of distance (physical, language, maybe even ontological distance) seemingly translated into proximity qua technological mediation that paradoxically makes love in the
installation less mediated, more imminent. Then love is essentially relational—love is a quality
of a “rationality between a self and an other” (Margaret E. Toye), or love is “proximate distance”
(Luce Irigaray). Therefore love is political.
Katja Kobolt / Red Min(e)d
I Was Like You Before I Got Stoned By The Fresh Air
2014
Digital photograph mounted on PVC-Forex board, framed
170 x 113 cm
Ed. 3+2AP