Manifesto GREAT WAVE

On February 18, 2018, thirteen years after Harald Szeemann passed away, a member of Manifesto Collective sent him a posthumous letter. The letter alludes to the cooperation, visibility, and support that Szeemann gave to the Albanian art scene in the 2000s and to the ruinous contemporary art conditions in which Albania finds itself nowadays. 

Albania today has remained a testing ground for neoliberal experiments, a dump site, a barren land unable to produce critical artistic or theoretical practices, where freedom of speech withers. The so-called fusion of art and politics and the premature celebration of its utopian success have turned out to be a hoax and an artistic–political disaster. Out of this disaster, the current Albanian “art scene” has emerged as a ready-made of sorts: it merely supports the political power upon which it relies, refusing to engage with the underlying issues. Instead, it wallows in lazy curatorial projects, carried out by local and foreign curators alike, supported by a charade of politically correct foundations and funding bodies.

Albania has not invented a great historical narrative, unlike many of its neighbors. Here, the conditions of modernism are still able to open up different possibilities for art, possibilities that can be developed without replicating situations and experiences that have already happened elsewhere. For several years, the Manifesto project has been analyzing and working on these particularities, through its first two editions Manifesto HIJACKING (2022) and Manifesto DESERTION (2023). In this third edition, Manifesto comes as a GREAT WAVE (2024–25), proposing a new movement in the visual, cinematographic, theoretical, and political arts: a movement that deconstructs the country’s past along with its current neoliberalist consolidation, offering a critical retrospective outlook that focuses on social reality and proposes a new historical narrative of Albanian arts and society.

Manifesto GREAT WAVE is divided into four parts: The Last Socialist Realist Painting is a new commission from renowned socialist-era painter Zef Shoshi, intended to be donated to the National Museum of Fine Arts of Albania (GKA). Accompanied by a text by Sonja Lau, this painting meditates on the post-1990 transition by depicting the new generation of Albanian cultural producers as having always already anticipated the continued instrumentalization of art for political purposes; Cinema on Trial: From the Newsreels of the Communist Show Trials to the Revolutionary Vigilance Films, a monograph by Jonida Gashi on the legacy of the Albanian communist show trials, examining the continuation of their avant-garde and modernist impulses in Albanian socialist realist cinema, a Biblioteka Art & Politikë (BAP) volume published by Pika pa sipërfaqe; The Albanian Mechanism by Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei, an ongoing series of investigative journalistic texts on the liaison of art, politics, and organized crime unpicking current developments in Albanian politics and contemporary art and placing them in a wider historical context; and GREAT WAVE: TWO HOURS OF FRESH AIR, an unexhibition at ZETA Contemporary Art Center conceived by Armando Lulaj with the collaboration of Pleurad Xhafa and Manifesto Collective, which provides an overview of two decades of artistic activities, found performances of violence, and texts produced since the 2000s by the DebatikCenter of Contemporary Art. By proposing alternatives to the inevitability of neoliberal collusion of art and politics, this marginal archive has become the matrix to shake up today’s society. The unexhibition will be accompanied by a newspaper containing highlights of the projects of Manifesto together with critical texts from the last decade.

Manifesto Collective full cast & crew: Arie Amaya-Akkermans, Valentin Begarin, Boris Budini, Jonida Gashi, Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei, Raino Isto, Klodi Jahaj, David Kampi, Jora Kasapi, Ataol Kaso, Valentina Koça, La Société Spectrale, Sonja Lau, Armando Lulaj, Ylber Marku, Marco Mazzi, Wendy Morava, Redon Skikuli, Underground Movement, Pleurad Xhafa.  

Manifesto GREAT WAVE was supported by the Foundation for Arts Initiatives (FfAI), and Swiss Cultural Fund, a project of the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC). 

Events
GREAT WAVE. TWO HOURS OF FRESH AIR: November 22–December 15
All inmates are allowed two hours of fresh air.

Biblioteka Art & Politikë (BAP#3): November 29, 6–8pm
A Collective Monument: Socialist Realism as History and Method, edited by Raino Isto.

IMPRISONING THE PRISON I: performance: December 8, 6–8pm
The Contemporary Crisis and the Zero Degree of Criticism and Curatorship in Albania (witnessed by), 2013-30.

IMPRISONING THE PRISON II: performance: December 13, 6–8pm
Reenactment of Underground Movement’s sawchains (witnessed by), (2002), on the Palestinian genocide. 

Biblioteka Art & Politikë (BAP#4): February 6, 6–8pm
Cinema on Trial, a monograph by Jonida Gashi.

Conference workshop: February 7, 6–8pm
The 1990s as a Time of Unmaking and Remaking Culture in Albania, conceived and organized by Jonida Gashi & Ylber Marku.