Erëmirë Krasniqi ‘13 curates the Kosovo Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale, which has been awarded a Special Mention for National Participation

Erëmirë Krasniqi ‘13 has curated the Kosovo Pavilion at the 60th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, running from April 20 to November 24, 2024. As part of the prestigious cultural institution, participating nations of the Biennale are officially represented with a national pavilion. Kosovo’s pavilion exhibition, a sculptural installation titled The Echoing Silences of Metal and Skin, marks the twelfth year of Kosovo's participation. The installation addresses how “gendered labor in industries like food production has rendered women economically vulnerable and pushed them to the political margins.” At the Awards Ceremony, the Republic of Kosovo’s team of artists was awarded a Special Mention for National Participation by the Biennale Jury.

Krasniqi is an art writer, curator, and researcher based in Prishtina, Kosovo. She received her BA from Bard College Berlin in 2013, going on to complete an MA from Dartmouth College. As an independent curator, she has led and curated projects for the National Gallery of Kosovo, National Gallery of Arts in Albania, and 39th EVA International in Limerick, Ireland. Her research interests range from histories of socialist modernist art to grassroot expressions that challenge dominant historical narratives. Since 2017, she is the executive director of Oral History Initiative, an open-access archive which engages new forms of cultural production, supporting and advocating the essential work of media archives.

“The history of Kosovo’s participation in the Venice Biennale is brief,” Krasniqi explains in an interview for EastTopics Magazine. “In a span of twelve years, Kosovo has been represented successfully through projects that dealt with identity politics, the 1999 Kosovo war, missing persons in Kosovo, and the way these experiences have been mediatized by international media. All these projects have resonated with one another and continue to have a major importance in weaving collective narratives.”

However, Krasniqi notes, this year's exhibition will take a different direction. She explains, “The 60th edition of the Venice Biennale is an opportunity for a small country like Kosovo to showcase an artist of the younger generation… As a curator, shaping a curatorial project that tries to make visible narratives from the periphery of the skin and communicate from a critically-informed position is of great importance, but also a major thematic shift. This year we do not discuss war, but its aftermath. What happens to women in unregulated economies whose only social capital is the labor that they offer to the market? Placing these issues in a broader global context means a great deal to me, because projects such as these initiate conversations beyond the local context."

Read more about the exhibition, Krasniqi’s work, and the team of artists here.

Post Date: 07-25-2024