Speculating on the Blue

Speculating on the Blue is a site specific installation conceived by Flaka Haliti for the Kosovo Pavilion at the Biennale Arte. With this work she addresses the topos of borders that are not only part of her personal history but also our everyday global reality. The artist specifically examines the features of the borderland, often deserted and seemingly decaying within a short period of time. Barriers are manmade manifestations of political decisions made about territories, which are often drawn with little regard for natural and ethnical boundaries. Haliti aims at de-militarizing and de-familiarizing the aesthetic regime that is embodied by physical borders through the creation of a counter image. In doing so she transforms the former into a sign of optimism. Her approach is one of recontextualizing global politics through disconnection from its regime of appearance. The metaphor of the horizon, simultaneously emblem of possibility and enigma of our limitations is woven into the fabric of our past and present. 

By drawing on the universal meaning of this metaphor, the artist removes the image economy of the horizon from any specific spatial-temporal context and speculates on its validity as an eternal truth.

Flaka Haliti is not interested in the recent debate on the political per se. She avoids and escapes the fashionable. Her credo goes more like: less political to be more political. Haliti performs this gesture smartly, being fully aware and understanding the sensitive and complex nature of setting herself apart from a previous, male-dominated generation in Kosovo, which primarily aimed for European integration in the sense of a deep and somewhat ironic longing for the West. Her work neither questions nor does it provoke in a blunt fashion. Rather, she responds to provocation and existing realities without an underlying or superimposed ambition to provoke: less irony – more easy. 

Markus Miessen