KUB Billboards
Flaka Haliti
16 | 02 – 22 | 04 | 2018
During 2018, four young female artists are being invited to present a series of imagery across the seven billboards along Seestraße in Bregenz. The year will begin with Flaka Haliti, born in Pristina, Kosovo.
In the era of digital imagery, Haliti’s work revolves around such romantic ciphers as clouds, moons, and love letters. And yet Haliti endows her imagery not with gravity, but with a yearning, awkward note. Emotions and messages of love in the digital age are issues she addresses, disguised in the medium of childlike drawing.
Flaka Haliti about her work
“When I had my solo show – in 2014 at the National Gallery in Pristina – I painted some walls gray in the exhibition space. And at a certain point – hours before the opening – there was a blurry spot on the wall which at first I thought was paint that hadn’t dried or not been well painted, looking closer I realized – weirdly enough – that light reflection had somehow broken through, quite a distance from the left glass entry door, projecting a spot of uncanny rainbow colors of about 5 cm x 10 cm. I photographed how it looked. Then I mixed these images in two and reproduced them as lenticular prints, so when the viewer moves, the rainbow animates itself, moving too, or disappearing... I like the idea of bringing an image of the rainbow which once was spotted on a wall somewhere in a south-east European architectural setting, to a public wall, a billboard on a busy thoroughfare.... From east to west, as Austria is considered the first western border to the east... right? So, in this case, the rainbow becomes a kind of traveling ghost. It's very abstract on many levels and I think it's visually quite obscure as well... but it will definitely work within the concrete frame of the billboards. I consider billboards to be commercial publicity, consumed mostly through vernacular imagery – however, I would like to do the opposite – certainly something more opaque, a format and aesthetic that perhaps doesn't appear that often in a street in such a manner, but nevertheless as an aesthetic constitutes a common sense within a shared space, a sensibility that can be apprehended by everybody, because ultimately it remains just an abstract rainbow.“
Flaka Haliti in an Email to Thomas D. Trummer, Director of the Kunsthaus Bregenz.
Biography
Flaka Haliti lives and works in Munich. She studied at the University of Prishtina and Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main. She is currently working towards her PhD at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.
Haliti’s work has been presented at mumok and Kunsthalle Wien in Vienna, the 6th Biennale in Moscow; Kunsthalle Lingen; Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig; National Gallery of Kosovo in Pristina; ZKM in Karlsruhe; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; and Portikus in Frankfurt am Main. In 2016 she was awarded the Ars Viva Prize. In 2015, she represented Kosovo at the 56th Venice Biennale.