++++ Where Alban Hajdinaj comes from, glamour and wealth are rather a long way off and out of reach for most people. The artist from Tirana in Albania engages in his work critically with the cultural and ethical conditions reigning there using everyday objects. For his contribution to Manifesta he chose a very special insignia of affluence, the prestigious bowl. He has reconstructed it as an aristocratic object of decoration, with feet, handles and rich ornamentation.
In this or a similar way do they stand, or stood, in the china cabinets of influential families, almost completely unusable because of the valuable ornamentation, only to be handled wearing white gloves, and the last spoonful of soup eluded every attempt to get it out of the opulently curved utensils. Hajdinaj's version of the luxurious crockery is an ironic farce because his apparently valuable objects are made of cheap household goods and porcelain knick-knacks. Three small rubber dolls the size of a seedling box are each wearing a soup dish made in China on their heads and are flanked by almost blindingly lurid textile flowers from a discount market. A ballerina made of plaster in a tutu is balancing a plate with a printed floral pattern on her hands and everywhere, figurines with a highly kitschy appearance copy her gesture with other worthless crockery. For the rest, ugliness and radiance are positioned side by side on the shabby table on which Alban Hajdinaj presents his ensemble. The 28-year-old artist does not present the needs of people for making grand gestures despite having only a small budget. He does not simply poke fun at the romantic longing for aristocratic elements in every day life with his objects, but also presents them as a symbol of social conditions. The arrangement of dolls in his exhibition room at Frankensteiner Hof is complemented by a melancholy triptych which presents the end of a porcelain couple consisting of a young shepherd and a shy maiden in three steps. The two young people are unfortunately situated on a highway and a truck is approaching out of the distance. In the last of the three paintings, the truck’s dark grill almost completely fills the picture, although the loving, gentle looks of the couple are unchanged and they remain completely unimpressed by their approaching destruction in view of their great love for each other.
Frankensteiner Hof, Große Rittergasse 103.hoh