The Great Smog of 2021 is the Kosovan iteration of FUTURE ECOLOGIES, a programme from WE ARE HERE: Artists’ Moving Images from the British Council Collection and LUX.
“The Great Smog of 2021” explores the possibilities of a future where societal inaction towards climate change has turned our once green world into a grey dystopian planet; a planet comprised of concrete and technology akin to that we often see in futuristic movies or video games.
In these dystopian realities, landscapes are pertinent to understanding the past – a previous world unrecognisable through its value of nature. The romanticised beauty of these particular landscapes rally against the corruption of city life, where a simple flower can become a political tool.
Curator of the exhibition is Engjëll Berisha, a curator based in Prishtina.
Exhibition took place at the The National Gallery of Kosovo from 8 November 2021 and was opened for audience until 8 December 2021. Find pictures from the exhibition here.
About the curator
Engjëll Berisha is a diverse cultural professional. His 10 years of experience span over journalism, art producing, and curating. The past four years he has been working as a general coordinator for The National Gallery of Kosovo, as well as assistant commissioner and coordinator for the Pavilion of the Republic of Kosovo at the 58th Venice Biennale, in 2019 for Alban Muja's project "Family Album".
Artists' biographies
Uriel Orlow - lives and works between London, Lisbon and Zurich. Orlow’s practice is research-based, process-oriented and multi-disciplinary including film, photography, drawing and sound. He is known for single screen film works, lecture performances and modular, multi-media installations that focus on specific locations and micro-histories. His work is concerned with spatial manifestations of memory, blind spots of representation and forms of haunting.
Louis Henderson - a filmmaker and writer who experiments with different ways of working with people to address and question our current global condition defined by racial capitalism and ever-present histories of the European colonial project. Since 2017, Henderson has been working within the artist group The Living and the Dead Ensemble. Based between Haiti and France, they focus on theatre, song, slam, poetry and cinema, their first feature film Ouvertures was awarded a FIPRESCI special mention at the 70th Berlin International Film Festival 2020. His work has been shown in various international film festivals, art museums and biennials and is distributed by LUX and Video Data Bank. He lives and works in Paris.
Charlotte Prodger - a Glasgow-based artist working with moving image, writing, sculpture and printmaking. She was the winner of the 2018 Turner Prize and represented Scotland at the 2019 Venice Biennale. She received the 2017 Paul Hamlyn Award and the 2014 Margaret Tait Award.
Ben Rivers - studied sculpture before moving into photography and super8 film. After his degree he taught himself 16mm filmmaking and hand-processing. His practice as a filmmaker treads a line between documentary and fiction.
Alban Muja - a Kosovan contemporary artist and film-maker. In 2019 he represented Kosovo at the 58th Venice Biennale. In his work he is mostly influenced by the social, political and economical transformation processes in wider surrounding region, he investigates history and socio-political themes and links them to his position in Kosovo today.
Nimon Lokaj - a Kosovan painter. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts of Belgrade in 1969. His works have been widely exhibited in Kosovo, Yugoslavia and the rest of Europe during the 1970s and the 1980s. His works are part of The National Gallery of Kosovo’s Collection.
Blerta Hashani - a Kosovan contemporary artist. Her works are mostly paintings and videos that generally describe her daily life, various events and the environment that surrounds her.