JAKUP FERRI

STORY’S FORM FORMING STORY
2006-2008
Installation with a drawing series for photocopying, photocopy machine

Ferri’s work doesn’t manifest any traumatic experience. It is more about the history of contemporary art, which he is not part of, about rock’n'roll heroes, his childhood memories of life in a ‘normal’ world (clocks, father’s shoes, father’s art monographs), the lethargy and boredom of urban life, etc. In Ferri’s silence on the issue we can in a way see that the new generation of contemporary artists in Kosovo are not interested in the works of their “aesthetic” fathers. No work of young Kosovo artists bears witness to any conflict, irony, parody, or critique to the old generation of contemporary abstract painting of Kosovo modernism from the late 1960s to the late 1980s. All those are passé, fossils and dinosaurs from art academy curricula, representing the heavy national burden of ethnological and historical consciousness of being proud of being Albanian. These modernist painters, among the most prolific ones are Muslim Muliqi, Rexhep Ferri and Xhevdet Xhafa, were the ones who dealt with national representation as aesthetical mediators, ones who were canonizing the political traumatized situation of Kosovo with artistic values. Jakup Ferri and his generation of artists now, in order to find some new way of expressing their everyday life politics, have totally rejected the aesthetic formulations of the old generation; first they changed their medium from painting to not-yet-discovered medium of video art and then, instead of questioning the local and recent actual political history, they contextualized their artworks in the frame of international art history, referring to artists such as Damien Hirst, Yoko Ono, Bill Viola, Marina Abramović, Christo, Baldessari etc. These non site-specific artworks, which had the function of normalizing the post Rambouillet situation in Kosovo, created also a lot collateral damage. Damage such as silencing the collective trauma for the sake of normalization, or de-politicizing contemporary art for the sake of non site-specific formulations…Looking at Ferri’s drawings, where he is using bullets and guns in the most productive, and in the most abstract, everyday life practices, like climbing the stairs, in Sisyphus-like games, we feel that anyway trauma is always there, but now silenced and closed from the banal interpretations.

(An excerpt from Sezgin Boynik’s text Force of trauma; for full version see http://victims.labforculture.org/site/texts/force-of-trauma)
JAKUP FERRI (1981, Prishtina, Kosovo) studied at the Prishtina Academy of Arts (2001-2004) and Rijksakademie Van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam (2007-2008). He is the winner of the M.Mulliqi award and Artists of tomorrow award in Prishtina as well as unstpreis Europas Zukunft (The Future of Europe), Leipzig.
He presented his works at solo shows at Artists Space, New York, Galerie Adler, Frankfurt am Main and 1.60insurgent space, Tirana. A selection of group shows includes: U-TURN Quadrennial for Contemporary Art, Copenhagen, The Use of Every Sunbeam, Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, SPAPORT, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Banja Luka, Prague Biennale 3, Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Wien, e-flux Vídeo Rental, Zacheta National Galery, Warsaw, 47th October Salon, Belgrade, Galerija Škuc, Ljubljana, Cetinje biennale V, Cetinje, Galerija Nova, Zagreb, In den Schluchten des Balkan, Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel.