Genti Korini at Manifesta 2022
We are very happy to announce Genti Korini’s participation at Manifesta Biennial open tomorrow in Pristina, Kosovo.
In his artistic intervention, Genti Korini draws on the modernist trope of the artist as spider, as a weaver of illusions, while squaring with Alfred Uçi, the Albanian art historian whose writing helped enshrine the doctrine of socialist realism in community Albania.
Spider’s Envy – Genti Korini’s new 20 minutes video work will be displayed as part of the permanent program at the Grand Hotel Prishtina.
Curator Catherine Nichols explains:
An artist and a critic wind their way around each other in a labyrinthine modernist ruin. Enmeshed in an intricate interrogation of modernism, strangely resonant of contemporary discourse, the two adversaries pit realism against abstraction and the socialist “new man” against “his” bourgeois degenerate counterpart. Their contrary lines of thought stem from the mind of one and the same person: the Albanian art historian Alfred Uçi. His excoriating critique of modernist aesthetics, ‘Labyrinths of Modernism’ published in 1978, helped enshrine the doctrine of socialist realism in communist Albania. It assisted the persecution of countless artists perceived to deviate from its dictates. Genti Korini juxtaposes a neo-noir staging of Uçi’s interior dialogue with a secret service file that denounces an artist for his aesthetics. Korini draws on the modernist trope of the artist as spider, as a weaver of illusions, a creature as admired for its creativity as it is despised for its treachery. Yet who is the spider and who is the prey? And who entraps whom in which deceit?
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*Spider’s Envy is commissioned by Manifesta 14 Prishtina and is produced and supported by Anima Pictures, Albania.
