Daring duvets and a life spent covered
An exhibition in that small gallery in Qafa neighborhood of a young artist born in Gjakova but living in Berlin, reveals the power of an object that covers a good chunk of our life
Two months ago, we had the chance to see for the first time the seminal work of British artist Tracey Emin called “The Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made,” at the Faurschou Gallery in Brooklyn. We were at the exhibition with Arlinda, just a few days after the opening of Petrit Halilaj’s oh-so-inspiring exhibition at the Metropolitan Musem of Arts.
Emin’s installation is a living space transported to the middle of the gallery, a working bedroom where the artist locked herself for weeks sometime during the 1990s — completely naked — trying to overcome the trauma of painting, the canvas, and the revulsion against the smell of paint she experienced after abortion and related depression. Tracey Emin had abandoned painting, and this self-isolation was a violent attempt to confine herself within four walls and return to the medium. Beer bottles, cigarette butts, thrown and hanging women’s clothes and socks, unfinished paintings, were all part of the room.
Naturally, there was also a bed. And a duvet.
The duvet was also an important element of Tracey Emin’s other work “My Bed,” which had catapulted the artist as a finalist for the prestigious Turner Prize. This work centers around an unmade duvet, in the state we leave it when we wake up. The concept for “My Bed” by Emin was explained as a result of a phase in her life with a lot of sex but also depression, when she stayed in bed for four days without eating or drinking anything other than alcohol. When she saw the mess she had made in her room with the disheveled duvet, she suddenly realized what a piece of art she had created.
This duvet caused a lot of noise in the art world at the time. The duvet in Tracey Emin’s famous work is quite a multi-vocal object, with many meanings, but it certainly projects intimacy, vulnerability, the reality of personal and emotional space, so often warm when inside the duvet, facing the cold world outside it.
But Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s work, “Untitled — (billboard of an empty bed)” has a different quality. It is a billboard, an advertising panel, that was spread across New York depicting an intimate scene: a bed with unfolded duvets and two pillows with two depressions, as if two people had just lifted their heads from them. The viewers could imagine this to be the first scene of a morning, and it’s easy to further imagine that the couple in question might be in the kitchen, brewing the first coffee of the morning or preparing eggs with avocado.
But the couple in question are no longer there. The empty bed and the unfolded duvet and pillows pressed from sleep, in this case, will never be folded again.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres, with the duvet that remains forever hoping for the repeated intimacy of the users, makes it clear that this is the bed of someone who has died. The message was both political and personal: about the loss of people from the LGBTQ+ community who were dying from AIDS at the time. Thus, the work also became an urban icon of the identity struggle in the dirty streets of the cities and the clean corridors of power where decisions were if love is love, if people need to hide behind duvets, closets, covers, and other barriers to show who they are and who they love.
We don’t need to go to New York to see the readymade installations of Tracey Emin or Gonzalez-Torres to understand the symbolic potency of the bed and the duvet.
It was Erzen Shkololli who, in 1999, brought “The Bed,” a gleaming but dark work, a bed decorated with super precise traditional lace and decorations, with a specially made duvet, which was used for funerals, or as the last bed of the deceased in Peja, before traveling to the eternal life.
Erzen’s work is not morbid, on the contrary — it is a multifaceted testimony of a tradition that beautifully accompanies the dead person, and the delicate process of producing this object by women, precisely for this final rite of passage. This duvet is not meant to be unmade or unfolded. Under this duvet, no one will hide anymore, to warm themselves from the external cold. This is the last duvet of the person, ice cold, like death itself. This bed is also a catafalque of sorts — reflecting Byzantine, Ottoman, or Roman Catholic rites, immersed in forgotten mysteries and lost and mixed traditions between religions and historical epochs.
Loss in Shkololli’s well-known work centers on the ritual and no matter how syncretic it is between diverse cultures and traditions, it is culturally standardized, following a custom, a standard. It leaves no room for ambiguity.
With these fresh references and experiences in mind, I was intrigued to see the exhibition of young Albanian artist Barbara Prenka, curated by Zef Paci at the Gallery of the Ministry of Culture. First, it must be said that the small gallery in Qafa has been transformed into a genuine exhibition space for several years now (indeed, improvments started when Shkololli served as director , with a better thought-out program and better-made exhibitions. I lived in Qafa many years ago, but that gallery at the time was more like a space seemingly rented out to whoever had an idea, rather than a real gallery with a real program.
The duvets hung like decorative carpets in the exhibition initially surprise with their intense colors and the plasticity of the material.
But, Barbara’s duvets also have, or at least invite, a dose of nostalgia.
It is not nostalgia turned towards the sorrow of existence or the memorialization of loss, which the duvets of Emin, Shkololli, or Gonzalez-Torres might evoke, but rather an illumination and contemplation of the duvet as an manufactured object, what it represents and the history of local craftsmanship in Kosovo.
Kosovo has always had duvet makers and the duvets have also had decorative elements, but Prenka has now recreated, remade them, and now they come to us exhibited with an explosion of colors, with changes in processing technology, but with no less gravitas or symbolic weight.
There is a kind of dichotomy between the declared intention and the artist’s narrative displayed in earlier works, where the methodology of work (embroidery) and gender roles and identity play a prominent role, as well as the concrete duvets we see in front of us that are playful, eye-catching, inviting not to cover the body from end to end during long nights in the dark and cold world, but to cover oneself and friends or lovers (singular or plural) in a green field, when it gets a bit cold, at some trance music festival in nature.
A duvet is a duvet, its role is to cover the body (alive or dead) but Barbara Prenka’s colorful duvets seem more to highlight the beauty of all life, rather than cover the shame of specific, particular actions we do in life.
The colors of Barbara Prenka’s inviting duvets project the present, the handmade influenced by the hyper-colors of the Internet and contemporary abstractions.
But that’s not all.
Suddenly, in a slightly hidden room of the gallery, behind a black curtain, with green walls (like the greenness of the grass in the above-mentioned festival fields), the artist has scattered drawings with crayons, very intimate pieces of art, with completely reductive illustrations of the duvet details bent or folded, but only as minimal outlines, abstract contours of parallel lines in white paper. The artist claims she is focused on “methodical repetition of the object, with small changes in color and structure.”
In any case, here you see echoes of other feelings, with a much more focused perspective on the object, much more intimate. Almost whispering.
And in between the large, brightly colored duvets that project social and technological changes on the one hand, and the minimalist drawings that display the details of the duvet and the bed and a past life under them, lies this artist’s world — much more fragile and ambiguous than it seems at first glance.
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Original text was in Albanian, published as a guest writer in Suzanne’s Substack (a bilingual page brimming with content and podcast Suzanne)
https://suzannepodcast.substack.com/p/jorganat-joshes-e-nje-jete-te-kalume
