Going Nowhere Slow. Lori Lako

Going Nowhere Slow, both a title and a provocation, borrowed from Mikkel Krause Frantzen’s book, which examines the experience of depression and the ways in which it is shaped by our contemporary condition. Lori Lako’s exhibition at Bazament Gallery, emerges as an intervention into the discourse on labor, the human body, and temporal dynamics in the era of late capitalism.

Lako’s critique on the neoliberal system finds resonance in Albania’s post-communist transformation and ongoing struggle while addressing the global economic and political instability. Though photographs, performance, installation and video, she sketches the tension between aesthetics and societal constraints.

A series of lit photographs capturing the hands of sign language interpreter with elongated nails engulfed in flames as she spells out and adapts the title of Mark Fisher’s groundbreaking texts in Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

The photographs juxtapose beauty and violence, epitomising the tension between aesthetic allure and the harsh reality. They resounds as a potent reminder that even within the clutches of an oppressive system, the human spirit can persist and resist.

Meanwhile, the artist is concentrated in the reading of few short remixed extracts, on social and political theory from influential thinkers of our times, finds her feet slowly encased in drying cement.

The work alludes on the condition of the 21st-century artist. In a world where art is increasingly commodified and corporatized, acts that afrm the autonomy and the agency of the artist are rare. The deliberate exclusion of the audience from her liberation implies speculation, underscoring the imaginative powers.

As in John Carpenter’s film They Live, where donning the truest of all glasses reveals the hidden messages, with this in mind, the motorcycle helmet visors installed in the space of the gallery, enhance the symbolic atmosphere of surveillance, and entrapment. They reflect the image of the viewer, creating a sense of self-awareness and, reminding us of our complicity in the systems we aspire to transcode, transcend or reprogram. Through her personal, as being political, Lori underscores art as a possible catalyst in tackling labor statuses, and exhortations in a quite inequitable world. Her showcase oeuvre can be grasped as a critique lens of Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle where all the images among all the commodities are seen often as eclipse of the reality.

Hence, the future psychogeographies are seen impossible, and as demonstrated by the displayed commissioned video by dancegreetings.com; a deliberate use of borderline self-exploitation service. The group of people selected by the artist on the web-site, accustomed to birthday wishes, resistance-less execute her order. Optimistically they shout out the title of the exhibition and start animating Lako’s music preference; Bach-Cello Suite Nr.1.

Exhibition samples notions of Crisis as Form, written by Peter Osborne and it is aligned with what Osborne posed in his queries: „How to make art in the age of the post-medium condition? How to make art when the art-world has become a branch of the culture industry? How to make art in the self- consciousness of these two historical conditions, without reaction or submission? In a word, how to make art today?“

Lako’s work reflects on this symbolic of the order, beckoning us to explore ramifying avenues of thought and action. In a world that seems to be going nowhere fast, let this exhibition be a compass for passing through realities, or a guidepost towards slowing pace of change and renewal.

Fasten your seatbelt! This QR-Code transports you in a prose that delves into the labyrinthine realm of concepts, emotions, and challenges encapsulated in „Going Nowhere Slow.” Through the fluidity of meaning it expresses the notion of art as a transformative force, capable of generating new perspectives and defying conventional boundaries. Ultimately encourages us to question the very nature of artistic creation and its place within our world.

Exhibition: Lori Lako, Going Nowhere Slow
Exhibition Duration: 05.10 – 24.11. 2023

Address and contact:
Bazament
www.instagram.com/bazamentartspace/
Rruga Pjetër Bogdani 37, Tiranë, Albanien

Lori Lako, born in Pogradec, Albania (1991). Her practice reflects on the condition of post-modern humanity, outclassed by images and messages that hinder the decoding of the world, historical memory and listening to the self. She investigates the mediation of historical and personal events by the internet platforms and digital devices. Lako studied Painting (BA) and Visual Arts and New Expressive Languages (MA), at the Academy of Arts in Florence and the Academy of Arts in Munich, Germany. In 2020 he won the “Ardhje Award“, a national award for young artists under 35, organized by the Zeta Gallery, Tirana. Recent exhibitions and screenings include: Noocene, curated by Silvia Vannacci, Palazzo Binelli, Carrara, 2023, (IT), Chambres, curated by Paolo Parisi and Pantano-Surace, MH hotel, Florence, 2023, (IT) Ekrani i Artit, curated by Zef Paci, Galeria e Artit, Shkodër, 2023, (AL), Summer Love – Welcome Home, curated by Serena Becagli, ME Vannucci Gallery, Pistoia, 2023, (IT), SCUB- Some Call us Balkans, Ex-Tipografia Rilindja, Prishtina, 2023, (XK), Le forme dell’Acqua, curated by Vittoria Ciolini, DryPhoto Contemporary Art, Prato 2022, (IT) Assuming we can reach the sky, Residency Unlimited, New York, 2022, (USA) The Patriot, from an idea by Jamian Juliano-Villani, O’Flaherty Gallery, New York, 2022,(USA) SCUB- Mealting imagination, curated by Enrico Tommasini, DKC INCEL, Banja Luka, 2022,(BiH) The revolution of the city around its dream, curated by Stefano Romano & Remijon Pronja, Bulevard Art and Media Institute, Tirana, 2022, (AL), Make me coffee make me a sandwich curated by Natalija Vujoševi , Galeria 17, Prishtina, 2021, (XK), Personal landscapes, curated by Serena Becagli, ME Vannucci Gallery, Pistoia, 2021, (IT) Klosterwiesgasse 74 / Ich höre einen Vogel Klagen – I hear a bird lament, a project by Styria-Artist-in-Residence, (St.A.i.R) & Center for Contemporary Art, Graz, 2021, (AT).

Darko Vukić (1992) – alias Sava Zolog: Interdisciplinary artist and writer. Defines work as a specific linguistic happening or situation that often transforms into entropy. Collaborates via various projects with cultural agents locally & abroad. Enrolled MA programme Postdigital Lutherie, Tangible Music Lab at at the University of Art and Design and the Anton Bruckner University Linz (2022). MFA – Transmedia Research (2016) at the FFA – Art University, Belgrade. Additional info: Curated: Prosthetic Pavilion, Wrong Biennale, latest third edition Zero Agency at the NewArt.City (2022); Post-YU+th Art Biennale in Montenegro (2021/22); Misleading Projectiles, Alterum project CEE Region (2021). Initiated: $vvarm – a plug-in platform for translation experiments in social, artistic & theoretical fibers. Edits & layouts the Tag_terror, web magazine. Recent: The end of the world as we know it, IAB conference; Templexity Awareness, text for 20th Pančevo Art Biennale RS (2022). Liminal_Acid_Hazards, Močvara Gallery; Resistance, Punctum Books (2021). Beyond Human, festival; AWC_13: Eurothana$ia (2020). ghost is{other, at DIM; Extravagant Bodies, Tech. Museum ‘Nikola Tesla’; Terrestrial Oddities, HBKsaar; RE-ND-ER-ED, Glasgow, UK; Diagramming Events Over Empty Horizon, workshop Kontejner.org, MKC Split (2019). hyper–hybrid, Munich (2017) etc.

Bazament is an art space dedicated to contemporary art in Tirana, Albania. Its main focus is to create an independent and sustainable contemporary art scene, by offering a new exhibition space where narratives and the discourse of Albanian contemporary art, can be shown and discussed, in close relationship to the international contemporary art scene. Bazament will function as a project space and will be focused on production of exhibitions projects and also on the discourse of Contemporary art by organizing talks, screenings, publications in collaboration with both local and international artists, curators and different independent and institutional actors of the field.