Exhibition. Fani Zguro

„When Palettes (everything) Become Paintings“ starts as magazine pages folded in four and used as palettes to mix colors. Over time they grow out of their initial state of studio process waste, turn into paintings and future projects. „Pushing An Elephant Upwards“ is like an out-of-focus battle between the camera lens and car headlights during a nocturnal highway trip. The headlights are out of control. They form a disobedient scenography, a sort of artificial firefly habitat. Lining them up is like making elephant float. The exhibition is inaugurated on October 20 and will remain open to the public until November 10, 2021.

Fani Zguro about his series When Palettes (everything) Become Paintings: Till the day that bizarre colony came crushing down, the thought I would again see paintings in my studio had never crossed my mind. It was the carefree use of palettes I employed from time to time to restore different objects, that spun the plot and tricked me into placing brushes and tubes on the showcase. I had no real palettes; I had no need for them. The palettes I employed were folded pages of magazines that drifted around the studio, till the day they turned into the prose, library, policy, first bang of the “When Palettes (everything) Become Paintings” series. The canvas was substituted by magazine pages framed in green brush strokes trying to contain the orbiting sun.

All my commercial tales – scenes from Constantinople, puppet shows, chess-playing robots, dogs that could smell out the most beautiful women – lived within those pages, which I always framed in my favorite Olive Green Deep 622+++, glistening at nightfall.

Pushing An Elephant Upwards was shot during a night car trip. For the whole film the camera tries to catch the crossing automobiles, in the end focusing nothing but their endlessly dancing flashlights. And what about the elephant? The elephant doesn’t really exist on film. The idea of its pushing – where the title comes from – is associated with all hard and tiresome task, bearing neither beginning nor end. “Pushing an Elephant Upwards” is shot on a single rec. The cars constantly appearing can’t be focused, due to the camera’s auto setting, and hence the monitor displays nothing but whirling flashlights, up and down, left to right, the movement due both to their displacement and to the car trip. The film is to be the mirror of what we can’t know, possess or get hold of. As the car’s headlights are beyond the camera’s reach, so is this video’s purpose. Man can’t possibly get out of the cage he’s stuck in with an elephant to lift, even if the elephant doesn’t really exist.

Fani Zguro was born in 1977 in Tirana. Lives and works in Berlin. Zguro graduated at the Accademia delle Belle Arti di Brera in Milan (1998-2007). In 2007 he won the International Onufri Prize assigned by the National Gallery of Arts in Tirana; in 2016 the International Mulliqi Prize of the National Gallery of Kosovo in Prishtina and the Best Video-Art award at TIFF Tirana. Zguro was part of the AiR program for 2017 at Q21, Museumsquartier, Vienna. His work has been shown at Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin, National Museum of Contemporary Art Bucharest, Musée des Civilisations de l’Europe et de la Mediterranée Marseille, Filmoteca Espanola Madrid, Photo Museum Braunschweig, 2nd Tirana Biennale, 3rd Mardin Biennial, 4th Young Artists Biennial of Bucharest, 6th Çanakkale Biennial, 13th Biennale of Cairo, Ludwig Museum Budapest, Belvedere 21 – Museum für Zeitgenössische Kunst Vienna, PalaisPopulaire Berlin, the New York Public Library and Centre Pompidou Paris.

Exhibition: When Palettes (everything) Become Paintings
Exhibition Duration: October 10th, 2021 to November 20th

Fani Zguro – www.fanizguro.net

Address and contact:
Gallery70
Rruga Abdi Toptani Tiranë 1000, Albania
www.gallery70.art