Artists

Genti Korini

Press release

Opening 14 November, 5–9 PM For folk in such lands, time has almost stood still. The wanderer from the West stands awestruck amongst them, filled with vague memories of the cradle of his race, saying, ‘This did I do some thousands of years ago; thus did I lie in wait for mine enemy; so thought I and so acted I in the beginning of Time…'.* In High Albania, Edith Durham imagines Albania not as a place outside Europe, but as Europe’s own past. To the Western traveler, unfamiliar customs appear as remnants of an earlier stage of the traveler’s own civilization. Geographical distance is converted into temporal distance: the people encountered in the present are made to stand for the observer’s imagined origins. This temporal fiction is the point of departure for Genti Korini’s In the Beginning of Time exhibition. His new paintings do not reconstruct Durham’s Albania. Instead, they assemble a world that seems to possess a history while refusing to disclose it. A pyromaniac and his brother, a bride, a young sister, two neighbors’ sons, an ethnographer and his wife, a fool, and dogs appear as members of a community whose location and chronology remain unknown. Their titles imply kinship, occupation, and social order, but the narrative connecting them is withheld. The paintings draw on the familiarity of portraiture while unsettling its promise of recognition. Faces emerge in acidic greens, violet blues, and incandescent yellows; bodies are elongated, inverted, or held in uneasy poses. Echoes of Symbolism, Expressionism, and historical Western portraiture coexist without settling into a single period. These figures seem at once inherited and newly invented, intimate and unreachable. Painting does not restore a lost time; it gives form to the instability of imagining one. In the painting The Ethnographer, the presumed authority of the observer is put on display. The man who would name and classify others becomes one more opaque figure in the scene, with a wife, a body, and a place among those he might claim to know. Yet this reversal offers no easy escape from the colonial gaze. The viewer is still tempted to treat these portraits as documents, their titles as evidence, and their strangeness as proof of another culture’s distance. Korini interrupts this expectation. The figures do not yield an authentic past or a culture made legible for an outsider. Instead, they expose how easily looking becomes classification, and how the desire to recognize another world can turn it into a reflection of one’s own history. In the Beginning of Time leaves the viewer with an unresolved position: not the privilege of knowing who these people are, but an awareness of the assumptions through which they are seen. *Edith M. Durham, High Albania (London: Edward Arnold, 1908), Excerpt from Olsi Lelaj, “The People of a Place: Notes on Time and the Other,”, Genti Korini, A Place in the Sun: On Staging the Unknown, Decolonisation and Contemporary Art, ed. Małgorzata Ludwisiak, Albanian Pavilion, 61st Venice Biennale.