The Sail of Permanent Defeat is an exhibition by artist Genc Kadriu, with a curatorial text by Ervjola Selenica. Eight new creations of the artist are exhibited at Bazament Art Space, which will be exposed from May 19 to June 12, 2022.
The Sail of Permanent Defeat presents the artist’s creativity through installations, audio, symbols and words. Kadriu’s works, esthetically curated, transcend the entirety of their appearance, delving into a deeper concept. They appear through the renewal of vital evolution creativity. While leaving room for mysticism, a common element such as wax bee is noticed in each of the creations. The artist sometimes uses wax bee to shape his objects and creations and sometimes to create shapes from it.
An installation entitled Pictura Somniferum is exhibited in the first room of the space, it consists of a femur bone with the real size of the artist’s leg, covered in wax bee and surrounded on its both sides by some burnt laurel leaves, which make the dark environment seem even more mystic. The audio is installed in the two corners of the room; a voice reads a few words from some notes written by the artist about his desire in relation to painting.
Seven other installations intertwined with relics and objects preserved from the communist era are exhibited in the second space of Bazament. At the end of the corridor that connects the two spaces, two jewelry boxes are exposed on two podiums, each of them contains specific objects. The installation Parts Without a Whole (2022) contains a fresco fragment from a village church dedicated to the patron saint of potters, accompanied with a potter wasp nest with some small bee’s wax balls, while in the Invisible Hammer (2022) the box contains some iron nails from the collapsed roof of a village church dedicated to Saint Paraskevi, the healer of the blind.
The installations The Black Sheep and Between my Finger and my Thumb have the same aesthetics as the aforementioned creations. The Black Sheep subtitled as Brightness of the Sun and The Freshness of the Shadow shows five samples of sheep wool tonalities, from the darkest to the brightest, placed inside a vanity wooden box. Its cover bears the sketch of a plan B on old paper. Meanwhile, Between My Finger and My Thumb (2022) shows a shell which was modeled after Ernst Haeckel’s Kunstformen der Natur, exposed between the artist’s index finger and thumb.
By Any Other Name (2021) shows two arrows with a spiny stalk of a rose, a wasp nest and hawk’s feathers isolated under the glass. These two arrows bring to mind at the same time the Cupid’s wish and Buddha’s parable on suffering. Sins of my Father (2022) is another installation in the second space, which contains resin from the pines of a wildlife sanctuary, placed in the shape of a semicircle, and in the middle, the head of a snake is drawn with soot on aluminum paper, implying the interaction between addiction, power and the trap that threatens around. The Sail Of Permanent Escape (2021) shows five archaeological-autobiographic creations made out of walnut shells, matchsticks and laurel leaves, which take the appearance of some minimalist boats on wax and also a brown paper with some writing placed on a small frame appears as an extension of this installation.
*Genc Kadriu is an artist, writer and curator from Kosovo. His interdisciplinary practice can be described as the performance of objects, the poetry of images and the reprocessing of stories that affect the redistribution of the coordinates of experience in the form of exhibitions and publications. His exhibitions, collaborations and publications are part of various projects at WIELS, Brussels; Taipei Biennale, Taiwan; Ludwig Museum, Budapest; SantralIstanbul, Istanbul; National Gallery, Pristina; Exit Gallery, Claire de Rouen and London. Kadriu’s poetic projects have been published and translated into various collections and publications. In 2015 he co-authored with the curator Dr. Corinne Diserens in the catalog about the Out of the Blue exhibition in Prishtina. Has twenty years of experience as a columnist on topics of art, architecture, cultural heritage and other socio-political complexities in Kosovo. Genc Kadriu is also the winner of the international award for photography “Gjon Mili”, 2013.
