PhD in Practice by JJ

The PhD-in-Practice is a doctoral program for research in artistic practice, set up by the Institute of Fine Arts and the Institute of Art Theory and Cultural Studies. The program provides participants with the opportunity to pursue their individual research projects in a collective environment with a strongly trans-disciplinary and international focus. It provides a concept of arts-based research built upon critical epistemologies, as developed in the context of feminist, queer, postcolonial, ecological, post-Marxist and other political and emancipatory projects.

FLAKA HALITI

The Aesthetics of Constructed Identities: Imagining the future

“The images can be read as a site of power production; they divulge the source of power and its use both in discursive and material constructions of femininity/masculinity and democratic and undemocratic subjectivity. And it is in this medium of political marketing where agonies, implicit ordering, and “othering” take place.”1

In my PhD in practice, I will try to produce a body of work that tend to open up an aesthetical and political space, in which critical questions about the problem of the transnational/national politics of representation in Kosovo are raised in order to end the culture of suspense.

My research attempts to pay attention to the role the image plays in the body, culture and politics. Moreover, trying to decode the power positions in the communication between locals and internationals? What kind of esthetic language do they use? What kind of stereotypes have been reinforced through the different visual communication tools in the state building process? And which direction the politics of representation in Kosovo will continue to go on?2

The principal target is to analyze the aesthetics in/through inter-disciplinary approaches such as in architecture, photography, videos and other media representation used during various active roles in peace-keeping mission. All in all, my research work aims is to combine materials that have been performing an aesthetic role in the history of the country in relation to the international factor, within spatial political transformations that have evolved after 1999. Chaptering various sequences in order to construct the history of the present and the future, to create yet again a contemporary forum that looks into the history of politics and contradictions within existing spatial artistic practices today.

This does not exclude the possible trap of how to find a way to present the artistic outcome result without repeating, and thus enforcing the same stereotypes. But as Boris Groys has argued in his book Art and Power (2008), it is possible not only to make a copy from an original, but also to make an original out of a copy.3 Repetitive into something unrepeatable which much likely the result could lead to be a kind of an installation/mix media form.

Flaka Haliti, born 1982 in Pristina. Lives and works in Munich, Vienna and Prishtina. Graduated from Academy of Arts, Prishtina University in 2006. And afterwards continued her education in for Meisterschülerin on Fine Arts Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main 2008-2013. In her artistic practice, which consists of field research culminating in conceptual aesthetics, she is using variety of media that generates an eclectic body of work, where several classic functions of repetition take place.

1 Jean-Louis quoted after Krasniqi In: Krasniqi, Vjollca: Imagery, gender, and power. The politics of representation in Post-War Kosovo, In: Gender Check: A Reader. Art and Theory in Eastern Europe, Köln, 2010, P. 258-259.

2 Kathrin Röggla in Conversation with Jeton Neziraj and Vjollca Krasniqi, In: Parallewelten im Kosovo. Ein Briefwechsel, 2009, http://www.goethe.de/ins/cs/bel/prj/unm/bri/deindex.html

3 Groys, Boris: Art Power, Cambridge, 2008, P. 62.

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The Aesthetics of Constructed Identities: Imagining the future