Deborah Schamoni

For her solo-exhibition its urgency got lost in reverse (while being in constant delay) Flaka Haliti created an undefined spatial-temporal scenario hosting a robot that consists of found objects that stem from the KFOR military camps in Kosovo. These objects were recycled by the artist in order to subvert, transform and to decolonize the materials that were originally used during the NATO peacekeeping mission by the foreign military troops. Each of these materials originally served a different purpose in the aforementioned camps which Haliti now diverts them from. By doing so, the robot-sculpture can be regarded as the artist puts it –citing Jose Esteban Munoz – as a ghost because “it is made out of non-being objects that are eminent, from things that are present but actually not existing in the present tense” (1). In this line of thought Haliti imagines her robot as a ghost that “is hooked in its own situation between past, present, and future... A lazy robot sitting there, reflecting on its status quo”.

The robot is complemented by a set of wings inspired by the ones that can be found in the paintings of the Renaissance-masters. In the given context these wings can be regarded as some sort of vehicle, assisting the robot to overcome the given space-time scenario.

1) Jose Esteban Munoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity

Text: LambdaLambdaLambda
Photos: LambdaLambdaLambda