Berlin Fellowship 2023 — Visual Arts

Vita

Alketa Ramaj graduated from the Academy of Arts in Tirana in 2006. She was awarded the Onufri Prize in 2012 and the Ardhje Prize in 2013. Her work is characterised by an incessant curiosity and a constant study of new forms of expression, which reveals a striking independence in the application of her own critical and personal working methods. The artist's emotional relationship with the environment in which she lives in terms of social connection, historical and political context is reflected in her practice, which develops in different media.

Residency

Can a network of simple drawing lines on paper, yet unrealized in a proper or solid body of work, expose the fragility of a human subject detached from his/her place of origin by a variety of gestures imprinted by hand on a thin white surface? What kind of emotional mapping is undertaken in this process and how much does it expose unpronounced experiences of its ‘cartographer’ – split between two worlds, the familiar and the unfamiliar? What can a contemporary collection of ‘raw drawings’ tell us about the liberating, decolonial gestures?

Starting from these questions, the project builds upon the series of drawings produced since 2020 as a platform that will include a new production stage: similar in style and format, but now enriched by visual references found in ethnographic items from the Balkan Peninsula in the collection of the Museum of European Cultures in Dahlem.