As Manifesta’s 14th edition opens in Pristina, Kosovo, the idiosyncratic, energetic western Balkan art scene comes into its own

Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu

Postwar Punk in Pristina

There’s a famous Albanian aphorism that Kosovars like to use among themselves in reference to their young nation: ‘I hope you live as long as the mountains.’ Such a saying makes sense, given Kosovo’s physical position in Eastern Europe and the western Balkans, ringed as it is by the Sharr Mountains in the southeast and the Kopaonik range to the north (as well as sitting landlocked amid Serbia, North Macedonia, Albania, and Montenegro). Now the country and the surrounding region are about to enter the spotlight in the international artworld: Manifesta 14, the nomadic European art biennial, opens in Kosovo’s capital, Pristina, on July 22.

The mountain metaphor is also tinged with a desire for collective singularity. The old trade town of Pristina is rapidly expanding, and the nation’s people were fighting for their autonomy long before the Yugoslav wars left their deep scars here in the 1990s. Kosovars have a burning passion for independence and a defiant, punk attitude regarding any form of belonging, whether that’s religious, ideological, or relating to citizenship.In Pristina’s cityscape, uneven layers from different eras form an idiosyncratic texture – there’s the Sultan Mehmet Fatih Mosque, built in 1461, but also the Monument for Brotherhood and Unity, completed in 1961, and Bill Clinton Boulevard, so named in 2009. After 1945, Pristina followed the Yugoslavian urban development motto of ‘destroy the old and build the new,’ which changed the city drastically. Fitting the ambition of Manifesta – founded by the Amsterdam-based International Manifesta Foundation and running since 1996 – to bring more art to geopolitically charged European regions, many new things will take place within Pristina’s old and not-so-old structures.

This year’s edition sees landmarks including the towering, rundown Grand Hotel Pristina, the brutalist National Library, and the partially fire-damaged Palace of Youth and Sports (a vast multipurpose stadium originally named after two Second World War Yugoslav Partisans to symbolize brotherhood between Serbs and Albanians, a sentiment that didn’t hold) transformed into venues for mediating art and anchoring community and discourse among the war-marked city’s creative scenes. The event’s hub is the refurbished Hivzi Sylejmani Library, which hosted the former Committee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia for Kosovo until becoming a city library and then falling into disrepair. Manifesta’s aim is to return it to the city, so to speak.

‘Our region is more than a history of conflicts and wars,’ says Doruntina Kastrati, a young Pristina-based installation artist showing at Manifesta 14. For her, the exhibition is an opportunity for regional artists to attract international attention despite ongoing obstacles (with the nation only partially recognized, Kosovar artists encounter difficulty moving freely: acquiring travel visas takes months of daunting bureaucracy). Of the 103 Manifesta participants, 39% are Kosovar, with another 25% coming from the western Balkans. Although Kosovo has suffered from inconsistent governance and corruption since declaring independence from Serbia in 2008, regional culture has managed to take root with remarkable resilience, grit, and hope: Initiatives include the young, grassroots Autostrada Biennale and the DokuFest International Documentary and Short Film Festival in nearby Prizren, the Anibar Animation Festival in Peja, and in Pristina, Stacion – Center for Contemporary Art.

In 2012, the art project Prishtinë – mon amour used the slogan ‘Never Stop Loving’ for performances around the city. The Pristina-born artist Astrit Ismaili, Rina Kika, and the Swiss artist tobibienz orchestrated the one-night event&nbsp;in the burnt-out part of the Palace stadium in the hope of bringing love back to the city (they succeeded). Last year, the pioneering environmentalist artist Agnes Denes’s Sunflower Fields grew as a crop of yellow blooms in the Palace’s grounds. Autostrada Biennale invited Manifesta 14 to collaborate on this project, as well as on Petrit Halilaj and Alvaro Urbano’s Forget Me Not – bright, oversize canvas flowers marking different phases of their relationship – in the National Library across town.In 2015, the potential of Pristina’s burgeoning artistic scene inspired Isabella Ritter and Katharina Schendl from Austria to open LambdaLambdaLambda, the city’s first international contemporary art gallery (which debuted at Art Basel via its Online Viewing Rooms in 2020, and in Basel itself in 2021, presenting the Croatian artist Hana Miletić in the Statements sector and Hanne Lippard in the Parcours sector). ‘There is a lot happening – lots of unused spaces are being renovated, and other [spaces] reactivated,’ says Schendl, describing the busy pre-biennial mood. Many local artists are setting up their first studios, and as Manifesta opens, LambdaLambdaLambda&nbsp;is launching an airy second space with a group show titled Nothing Like Home II by the homegrown artists Blerta Hashani, Brilant Milazimi, and Dardan&nbsp;Zhegrova.

Manifesta meets an art scene driven to change, thanks to a culture-friendly energy in parliament through Kosovo’s new prime minister, Albin Kurti, and its president, Vjosa Osmani (50% of Pristina residents are under 25 and Kosovo has the youngest population in Europe). ‘Manifesta’s task is not to add a temporary layer to a rundown hotel, a defunct brick factory, a burnt-out stadium, or an abandoned cinema, but to involve the entire local community in reconnecting with the sites, recognizing them as their own, in reactivating, reimagining, and ultimately reclaiming them,’ says Catherine Nichols, Manifesta 14’s Australia-born, Berlin-based creative mediator.She invited the Istanbul-based artist and musician Cevdet Erek to develop a work titled Brutal Times, on view in Rilindja, a monumental high-rise that is now home to a nightclub, among other things, but was previously the country’s most important publishing house, printing the Albanian newspaper Rilindja and two other papers, one Turkish and the other Serbian. On top of the Palace of Youth and Sports, the Munich-based Kosovar artist Flaka Haliti’s outdoor installation Under the Sun – Explain What Happened forms an uncanny, glowing sunset using discarded plastic window panels taken from a KFOR (Kosovo Force) camp hangar in Prizren (now Autostrada Biennale’s new home).

Nichols started working onsite in August 2021 and immersed herself in everyday life, visiting locations, learning from the people behind Kosovo’s cultural institutions and speaking to everyone from taxi drivers and shopkeepers to politicians, women’s and human rights organizers, and colleagues and students from the arts sector. The research allowed her to investigate the difficulties with reclaiming public space, the lack of cultural funding, and the stifling insularity. Manifesta’s title, ‘It matters what world worlds world: how to tell stories otherwise’, reflects local artists’ aspiration to acknowledge post-conflict narratives but not be solely defined by them. Nichols sensitively puts the rich complexity of local stories at the heart of the biennial, including the obstacles people face in not only making and showing art but also gaining access to good education and freedom of movement both at home and throughout Europe.

In this complexity, though, is also cohesion. Togetherness is the gist of Halilaj’s Manifesta 14 project, When the sun goes away, we paint the sky. The work ‘multiplies’ the stars that once lit the top of Grand Hotel Pristina: In the Yugoslavian era, it was indeed grand, with five stars and a suite reserved for President Josip Tito. But as the hotel fell into decline, the stars were removed and left strewn over the roof. Halilaj relights them there and places new ones down the building; he has also invited residents to put their own stars on balconies and in windows or gardens. The landmark building is ‘a reminder of the darkest times, when it was used by the forces of mayhem,’ he says, talking of a period when the hotel was occupied by Serbian paramilitary thugs. ‘But it also reflects recent times, marked by a certain indifference to the old focal points of collective memory.’ By reclaiming the stars, the artist dreams of a new sky over Pristina through intimate, shared storytelling – a new sky over eternal mountains.

Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu is a curator, writer, and educator living in Berlin.Photography by&nbsp;Leart Rama for Art Basel.Banner captions, from top to bottom: Palace of Youth and Sports, street view in Pristina, Grand Hotel Pristina, sports facilities inside the Palace of Youth and Sports, Grand Hotel Pristina

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As Manifesta’s 14th edition opens in Pristina, Kosovo, the idiosyncratic, energetic western Balkan art scene comes into its own