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REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, VENICE -- The National Pavilion of Albania will present A Place in the Sun, a new moving-image installation by Albanian artist Genti Korini, at the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia. Curated by Polish art historian and critic Małgorzata Ludwisiak and commissioned by Albania’s Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Sport, the exhibition will run from May 9 to November 22, 2026, at the Arsenale, Sale d’Armi.
The project unfolds as a three-channel video installation combining live acting, puppetry, animation, and an original sonic score. The work is staged in Zaum, a transrational experimental language developed by Russian Futurist poets in the early twentieth century. Conceived as a “pure language” without conventional grammar or syntax, Zaum sought to dismantle established linguistic and social orders. Korini draws on its irrational structure to push viewers to the limits of communication, opening a space in which meaning can be reconstructed beyond fixed systems of understanding.
Conceptually, A Place in the Sun reflects on Albania as a place persistently shaped by both external and internal projections. The exhibition also offers a poetic meditation on invisible cultures, minor languages, and marginalized identities. A central reference for the project is the 1916 Albanian Issue of Bloodless Murder, a magazine produced by an avant-garde group in Petrograd, now Saint Petersburg.
The publication satirized the nationalist and imperial ambitions of pre-revolutionary Russia, portraying Albania through lenses of exoticism and orientalist fantasy. In that colonial gaze, Albania appeared simultaneously as a romanticized frontier and a stage for civilizational hierarchies, revealing more about foreign anxieties and ambitions than about the country itself.
Korini’s multidisciplinary practice spans painting, moving image, photography, and objects. His work frequently explores Albania’s relationship to modernity, its historical legacy, and the tensions between reality and fiction, approaching history not as a fixed narrative but as an unstable condition. The Venice project continues his long-standing engagement with cultural identity and its complex manifestations, linking contemporary uncertainties with the unsettled dreams of a century ago, when borders, languages, and identities were in flux.
The artist previously presented Spider’s Envy at Manifesta 14 in 2022, staging a dialogue between two actors in a modernist ruin to examine communist Albania’s fraught relationship with modernism and the persecution of artists. As critic Nuit Banai wrote in Artforum in 2019, Korini’s work seeks both to diagnose culture and to suggest new forms of living and working together that connect local tradition and global perspectives.
Born in Tirana in 1979, Korini studied at the University of Art and Design in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, and earned his MFA from the University of Arts in Tirana. He is co-founder of the nonprofit art space Bazamet in Tirana. His work has been exhibited internationally, including at Manifesta 14 in Pristina, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, MNAC Bucharest, and institutions in Basel, Madrid, Florence, Hong Kong, Berlin, and Warsaw.
Curator Małgorzata Ludwisiak, Ph.D., is a Warsaw-based art historian, critic, and museum professional. She has held leadership positions at major Polish institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw and the Center for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle. A former board member of CIMAM, she has led and contributed to numerous international curatorial projects and conferences. Her research focuses on Eastern European avant-gardes, postwar art and architecture, decolonial practices, climate-related artistic discourse, and institutional critique.
