Adrian Paci: workshop with residency 2008

The autumn 2008 workshop was lead by guest artist Adrian Paci (Shkoder, Albania 1969). Paci is an Albanian artist of international renown who has resided in Italy for many years.

In the poetics of Adrian Paci and through the various mediums he uses– painting, sculpture, photography, video and installation – the forces of memory and distance work together in redefining the identity of an individual and of a people endangered by the dislocations and migrations already underway in this new millennium.
Indeed, his works are often a reflection on the themes of home, or of emotional bonds, understood both from the point of view of private, as well as public, life. In doing this he does not hesitate to mix imagination and reality. This can be seen, for example, in the painted scenes of his marriage, or in images from the well-known video in which one of his two daughters sings a nursery rhyme to which, from a separate screen, respond her family members who continue to live in Albania. This theme or wandering, of being far from the mark is also at the core of the large format photographs in which the artist portrays himself as a modern Christ who is forced to bear, instead of a cross, the upside down roof of a house.
Through his works, Paci forces us to think about what it means belong to a context, about how everything we might call “private” conditions and is conditioned by everything “public”. We must confront the concept of social roots, not only in the sense of origin, the literal position of migrants, but also in the more open sense of disorientation and the difficulty of feeling at “home.”
Paci has participated in numerous solo shoes in Italy and abroad, to mention only a few; the Kunstverein Hannover in 2008, PS1 MOMA in New York and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 2005 and the Baltic Art Center in Gotland in 2003. Furthermore in 2008 Paci will be in the faculty of the Center for Contemporary Art CCA in Tel Aviv.
Among the numerous group shows Paci has participated in it is worth noting; the Prague Biennale in 2007, the Busan Biennale, Korea and the Biennale of Sydney in 2006, the Venice Biennale in 2005, the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin and the Galleria Civica d’Arte Contemporanea di Trento in 2002.