Sokol Beqiri
Sokol Beqiri belongs to the first generation of artists to work with new media and part ways with the academicism that is rooted in Yugoslav socialist modernism. During the mid-1990s, through his production of art installations, performances, and videos, and his employment of critical distance and wit, Beqiri developed a visual language in which to respond to the systemic oppression of Albanians in Kosovo by the Serbian government. In 1997, he was part of the “Përtej” (“Beyond”) exhibition held in Belgrade at the Center for Cultural Decontamination, where he exhibited “Fluturon, fluturon” (“Fly, fly”)
—a series of ethnographic objects, wooden barrels turned into bombs by adding tiny cones. This work criticized the ethnonationalism and warmongering politics that the Milosević regime was continuing to pursue. Due to the frozen conflict, the exhibition was not well received by Albanians or Serbians. However, it did establish Beqiri as a provocative and politically engaged artist. His works from the early 2000s, such as the performance that he carried out in the ruins of Peja’s “Grand Bazaar” (1999), his installation “Kur engjëjt vonohen” (“When Angels Are Late”, 2001), and the video “Milka” (2000), are artistic responses to the violence and evils that surface due to wars. In Beqiri’s works, war has no geography. And by rejecting the political spatialization of war, he accords importance to the question of how we are to reassemble ourselves after such a dehumanizing experience. Beqiri’s work is political but not always by his own choosing. In the aftermath of the 1999 war, Kosovo was a UN protectorate, a new political space-in-the-making. Politics was busy shaping the postwar narrative and, in so doing, often rendered people voiceless. The work “Fuck You” (2001) reacts directly to this unequal distribution of power. A large photograph with Beqiri family members signaling the “fuck you” curse in the flag semaphore alphabet expresses the revolt of people muted by the international community. Reacting to what was going on in his surroundings, according to Beqiri, caused his work to be perceived as political. In 2006, Beqiri decided to no longer do art, and he declared as much in the video “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Art That You Are Afraid to Ask,” in which he set fire to his own fart. He had stopped believing that artists have a mission, having come to the opinion that if there is one, it is to undo art. E.K.
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