IBA Stage: 4th Autostrada Biennale

Hera Büyüktaşcıyan, Who Speaks From The Dusk, Who Looks From The Clay, 2023. Photo credits: Tuğhan Anıt

IBA Stage: 4th Autostrada Biennale
August 23, 2023 (Wednesday)
1:00pm (Prizren/GMT+2)

We are delighted to announce that for our August appointment with IBA Stage we will have a presentation of All Images Will Disappear, One Day, 4th Autostrada Biennale curated by Joanna Warsza and Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu. Founded in 2014 by Leutrim Fishekqiu, Vatra Abrashi and Barış Karamuço this dynamic and very caring institution staged its first biennial in Prizren in 2017. In 2022 the team inaugurated a permanent space for the biennial, Autostrada Hangar, which functions as a space for continuous learning, production and exhibition space which was developed to serve the biennial in its production but mostly as a place for local youth to develop their skills and interests in culture and the arts.
“We consider art production as a sustainable form of learning and exchange that addresses the needs of communities. For the upcoming edition of Autostrada Biennale, we are proud to produce a significant number of newly commissioned artworks in Autostrada Hangar”, state the founding directors of Autostrada Biennale, Leutrim Fishekqiu, Vatra Abrashi, and Barıs Karamuço.

All Images Will Disappear, One Day is an exhibition about what makes and unmakes us, what entangles and disentangles us from ourselves, about freedoms beyond choices, imaginaries that flow despite and across borders. It is an exhibition about collective autobiographies stored in cultural archives, those deep reservoirs of words, objects, patterns, feelings, or misunderstandings. It is about connecting with the unknown. What is unarchivable reminds us that all images disappear, one day, slipping into a temporal void. Yet art survives as a language of resistance and resilience, a way to validate our existence in the world, a horizon beyond imperial visual regimes.

The biennale takes you on a journey around former NATO hangars, where the core of the exhibition sits, and then down into the streets of Prizren, and farther to Prishtina and Mitrovica. It starts with an artwork that first took root in 2021, which follows the sun: Agnes Denes’s Sunflower Fields (2021–ongoing). Another thirty art projects await you, asking, in their metaphorical languages: Which images do we hold on to and why? How do certain past and future memories, be it of a puppet theater, a typographer, a sacred book, an endemic flower, a blackbird, a clandestine gallery, a children’s hideout, a nomadic playground, or a destroyed museum, persistently, and somehow unconsciously, live on? How does the past stop to form the present but not the future? And how do we fail to stick to the values that supposedly unite us all?

The exhibition, in accordance with its Latin etymology, ex-hibere, is a complex process of making something hidden visible. It is an invitation to travel through a set of multifaceted, social, poetic, and ephemeral art pieces across the three cities. It is a constellation of images that will disappear and open space for the construction of life anew. Therefore, it is about staying with what is difficult, but also about letting go at the same time. The exhibition promises unpredictable encounters in and out of Prizren, the Balkans, Europe outside Europe, and the planet. And finally, it is about hope and persistence, in spite of it all.

As always IBA Stage events are meant as a moment to hear about a project through its makers and have the opportunity to participate in a Q&A session at the end of the presentation.

Click here to register for the event or follow us through our usual social media channels.