From Instability to Utopia: The Art and Politics Emerging from 1990s Albania
Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei, independent scholar
Overview
Abstract
With the rise of artist–politician Edi Rama to power in the wake of the social and economic collapse of 1997, Albania saw the development of a particular form of propaganda, which married the political narrative of Third Way neoliberal social-democracy to the artistic movement of Relational Esthetics. The power of this discourse resided in the cooptation of a particular esthetics of contemporary art, its edginess and intellectualism – in particular its “ambiguity” – in defense of what was basically yet another form of authoritarianism.
This paper explores the political and artistic developments of the 1990s that provided the foundations for this unlikely alliance, in particular the transformation of an entire generation of middle cadre “nepo babies” that were thrust into a shock-doctrine capitalist casino system dominated by foreign donor subsistence, Ponzi schemes, and eventual near-civil war. It addresses the question of what precisely is meant with the concept of “transition”, and what forms of artistic and political alliance are sustained by it.
There are several points of entry that culminate into the Tirana Biennale project of the early 2000s and the concomitant rise of Edi Rama to a political supremacy that lasts until today. One of those is the story of the collapse of the socialist dictatorship over the course of several months in 1990–1991, and the role of several protagonists from the Art Academy in Tirana, including Edi Rama, in the student protests against the regime and the subsequent introduction of democracy and capitalist shock doctrine. Another thread can be located in the development of foreign connections of the Albanian art scene, mainly through a series of dispatches written by curator Edi Muka on the early but influential and widely read listserv Nettime.
The introduction of Albanian art on the global art stage happens at the 48th Venice Biennale from 1999, which, curated in a “new format” by Harald Szeemann, hosts the first Albanian pavilion under the title “Albania Today”, curated by Giancarlo Politi and featuring the works of Gazmend Muka, Alban Hajdinaj, Edi Hila, Astrit Vatnikaj, Lala Meredith-Vula, Sislej Xhafa, Adrian Paci, Edi Rama, and Anri Sala. The same biennale features in its main exhibition many of the new generation of artists that would later be associated with the movement of “Relational Esthetics” and make their appearance at the Tirana Biennale and other projects fostered by Rama: Rirkrit Tiravanija, Philippe Parreno, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, and Olafur Eliasson. The link between the discourse of irony and ambiguity attached to this movement and the Albanian artists presented in Venice is first established by Muka in his 1999 review of the Albanian pavilion under the header of “ironic optimism”.
In the same period of the late 1990s and early 2000s we see the ascendancy of “Third Way” social-democratic politics championed by Tony Blair and his influential spin doctor Alastair Campbell. This ideological brand, popularized in the region in part because of Blair’s active engagement with the Kosovo Liberation War, then becomes the template for Edi Rama’s own political rebranding of the Socialist Party, thus creating within his figure a union between a political ideology and esthetic paradigm.
Introduction to the speaker
Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei received formal training in linguistics (MA General Linguistics, Leiden University), multimedia art (MMus ArtScience, Royal Conservatory, The Hague), and philosophy (PhD Media & Communication, European Graduate School; PhD Modern Thought, University of Aberdeen), as well as group-analytic psychotherapy (Group Work Practitioner, Institute of Group Analysis). He is currently the director/CFO of open-access publishing house punctum books and the founding director/CEO of software company Thoth Open Metadata. Van Gerven Oei has published widely in the fields of philology and art criticism, and recently published Rënia e së ardhmes: Arti, korrupsioni dhe fundi i tranzicionit shqiptar (The Collapse of the Future: Art, Corruption and the End of the Albanian Transition) (Pika pa sipërfaqe, 2023). He continues to write about Albanian art and politics on his blog The Albanian Mechanism. Email: vincent@vangervenoei.com.