Exhibition Artists in Residency 2020-2021

This second part of the BIA project by Donika Çina resembles a series of interventions in public space which attempt to take care, protect and preserve the façade of the house and the vicinity of Bia. Acknowledging the risk that the house will be soon demolished by time or eventually destroyed for the sake of urban development and economic progress, this conservation and restoration of the house like it was when the owner was alive as well as the repetition of her daily routine in a series of performances and public interventions, has been digitally documented as a virtual memory of the city.

Donika Çina was born in 1988 in Korça, Albania, studied at Academy of Arts in Tirana Albania, University of Arts and Design Cluj-Napoca Romania and at University of Art Braunschweig, Germany. She lives in Tirana, Albania. Çina works with video art, video installation, and short movies. The subject of most of her works is she herself, her biography and the story of her family or those surrounding her. Her works have been exhibited in numerous exhibitions including; MSUB/MoCAB Belgrade; TIA MUCH KLIMA, Halle 50, Munich; Albania is not Cuba, Havana; Dejeuner avec Marubi, Belvedere 21, Vienna; In-Between, Zeta Gallery, Tirana; Double Feature #7, Tirana Art Lab; Ardhja Award, Zeta Gallery, Tirana; Tirana Open 1 Book and Art Festival, Tirana; Archivitionism (archivism-activism-exhibitionism), Galeria Plan B Cluj-Napoca; Autopia Cycle, Eliava Market,Tbilisi; The Office Tirana, National Gallery, Tirana, and Museo Orientale, Torino.

Since arriving in Tirana this September Hanna Hildebrand has been thinking about grids. In one of the first days in Tirana she observed on a construction site a lattice of steel rebar emerging from a block of hardened concrete; an abstract, rational, empty structure emerging from what can be considered our most used material after water. With this insight, in her installation LWCE T1, Hildebrand is exploring the grid as a space between ‘the concrete’, the imagined, the ideal and memories.

Hanna Hildebrand, is a multimedia artist with Italian & Swiss citizenship. She completed her studies at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main in 2009. Film and photography are her main means of expression. The genesis of her work often has a documentary foundation, with emotionally driven narratives drawn from her observations of contemporary life. At the moment she is concluding the ongoing project “Omega Transit”. This multidisciplinary work has a science-fiction plot touching on topics related to contemporary society while reflecting its utopias and dystopias. It is an expressionist oniric story which follows a group of oppressed beings which flee their own planet, to start a better life on a new one. One central element of the work is the use of existing architecture of Chiasso, Switzerland, the border town with Italy. The trilogy of videos are produced in collaboration with la rada, Locarno, with a cast of young non-professional actors.

The Tirana Time Capsules are a series of three virtual environments composed of 3D scans and audio field recordings from that act as time capsules for three different neighbourhoods of Tirana in 2021. The chosen areas – 21 Dhjetori, Kombinat, and an area of the Tirana Great Park – each embody different aspects of Tirana’s urban development over the past 100 years. Particularly since the early 2000s, this has been characterised by the gradual disappearance of public space as the building sector has increasingly become controlled by private interests. The work created by Alex Walmsley investigates the ways in which high-fidelity digital recording techniques appropriate and reconstruct public space in the virtual sphere and through subjective remaking can become a space where personal memory and community heritage merge.

Alexander Walmsley (b. 1992) is an artist and programmer with a background in anthropology and archaeology. He works with a range of media and tools, including photography, photogrammetry, 3D, VR, cartography and audio field recordings. In his practice, he is broadly interested in how image-making technologies shape and mediate architecture and landscapes in both the virtual and physical worlds. Recent and upcoming exhibitions include the Sharjah Art Foundation, The Photographers’ Gallery, Glasgow Science Centre, VRHam!, Kara Agora Art and Research Centre, and the Kunstquartier Bethanien. Alongside his own practice, he is also currently a research associate at the Film University Konrad Wolf in Potsdam, Germany.

https://www.alexanderwalmsley.co.uk/