Autostrada Biennale Makes History Its Material
A review of the biennale’s 5th edition, “Unfolding Currents: The Pulse of Time.”
In the vaulted chambers of Prizren’s Hamam, a series of objects by artist Doruntina Kastrati are displayed on cabinets re-imaged as circular slabs. Plastered in a coral kind of pink, the slabs match the patina of the 16th-century building. Cutting across the bathhouse, only a few of the display stands store Kastrati’s artefacts while most sit empty. These objects, fragments of pottery in various sizes –– sharp angular shards, the handles and rims of vases –– are organised in museum-like arrangements. Among the ceramic remains, Kastrati displays what can only be described as the dredges of the kitchen sink, clumps of hair and skin: bodily waste that often doesn’t make its way into the museum exhibit.
While these ‘artefacts’ nod to all kinds of histories, no captions or dates are offered to the viewer. What’s more, the little we are left with in the write-up questions the authenticity of the objects, of which, alongside those found, are also ones of Kastrati’s own making, we are told. So, the viewer is forced to create new interpretations out of muted artefacts. Objects that stand in as props to a history untold, awaiting the viewer’s intervention for captions.
This installation, of a museum gone awry, is in some ways a good metaphor for the fifth edition of Autostrada Biennale, curated by Erzen Shkololli. “Unfolding Currents: The Pulse of Time” sees the works of 25 artists, both local and international, presented at the biennale’s permanent home, the Autostrada Hangers and select venues in Prizren’s historic center. When Autostrada first began in 2017, as a volunteer passion project by Leutrim Fishekqiu, Vatra Abrashi and Barış Karamuço, the biennale had no fixed home or functioning contemporary art galleries to draw on. In the absence of facilities, the organisers repurposed public venues, like the city’s local bus station, to exhibit art.
Autostrada gained its permanent location in 2018, when the German Kosovo Forces (KFOR) withdrew from the site, leaving behind 39 hectares of land and multiple facilities in their wake. In a joint initiative between the German and Kosovar governments, the camp was re-imagined as an Innovation and Training Park. Autostrada Biennale became its first tenant in 2019. Since then, the site has transformed into the Autostrada Hangar – Centre for Contemporary Arts, a permanent fixture that exhibits art and hosts educational programmes between its biannual events.
Held in multiple sites across Prizren, from these former barracks in the city’s outskirts to Ottoman houses in its center, this edition makes the history of these buildings its material – a history it pries open through the plasticity of art. Shkololli, the biennale’s first native curator, draws on the transformations the venues have undergone to guide his curatorial logic. This is done, at its best, with readymades, ordinary objects repurposed into artworks – a practice that extends to the venues themselves, whose inclusion in the programme sees them transformed into found objects as well.
Shkololli rejects presenting the past as it is commonly found in museums.
In highlighting these transformations, Shkololli rejects presenting the past as it is commonly found in museums, where artefacts are displayed in their original contexts, with captions that outline the functions and dates they once had and were contemporary to. In contrast to this historicism, which sees objects privileged for what they once were, here functions are repurposed, contexts changed so that history is awakened and brought forward to the present.
At the Autostrada Hangars, this curatorial logic is announced with “Circulations” by Tamara Gričič, a large-scale installation where over 11,000 bottles are arranged in the form of watery currents, stretching and bending across the bare concrete floors of Hangar 3. Treated by Gričič with care, the industrial waste comes to life, taking the form of a river, one that shines in greens and browns refracted from the glass bottles by way of sunlight. A buoyancy and lightness only aided by the sound of wind, audio whistling from all corners of the vast space.
Gričič has removed this glass out of its production cycle to turn the material into temporary works of art. While the bottles are freed “from their original function,” this new lease on life will be short-lived; they are destined, once the exhibition is over, to be “fully recycled” back to their original use. Gričič’s work has much more interesting implications than the recycling public service announcement this footnote risks turning it into. Far more provocative than the practice of recycling is the beauty teased out of these industrial materials, a beauty that sees a river echoed out of stiff inorganic forms.
In the next room of the Hangar, Ayşe Erkmen’s “Left Overs II” follows a similar, albeit different logic. Out of wooden scraps sourced from local workshops, Erkmen produces colorful patterns across the military hangar’s grid structure. In tandem with the work of Gričič, these re-purposed objects bring the demilitarization of the buildings they are housed in to the fore – a transition that has seen what was once the storehouses of military equipment, now the bearers of art. This curatorial turn that buildings and objects take together, shake off, along the way, the tired references to war that Kosovo is often saddled with.
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“Left Overs II” Ayşe Erkmen. Photo by Tughan Anit. Courtesy of Autostrada Biennale.
Similarly, Armend Nimani’s photographs in Hangar 10 crack open Kosovo’s traumatic past for alternative readings. Images repurposed from Nimani’s practice as a photojournalist are enlarged here to museum scale, stretching the digital photographs to their absolute limits. From this process of enlargement, blotted and inky pixels emerge, which only make the images more painterly. The depicted scenes document all kinds of places and events, from local rites of passage, like circumcision festivals, to the nearby travel routes of asylum seekers. In “Missing Persons,” Nimani captures the grief of family members whose loved ones have yet to be found from the Kosovo war of the 1990s.
Shkololli has plucked these images out of their journalistic context, inviting Nimani to exhibit his work anew. Presented for the first time in a gallery context, Nimani’s images are freed from the blunt words of journalists, which such photographs are often in the service of. With this curatorial gesture, the images are no longer just photographic evidence, mere indexes of truth. They instead open up to other meanings, rattling a genre that has, for international audiences, visually marked the country’s most recent history.
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“Circumcision,” and “Refugee Crisis.” Photo by Tughan Anit. Courtesy of Autostrada Biennale.
Back in the city historic centre, the biennale takes on a much more intimate scale at its four other venues. In the Dorambari Family Residence, an Ottoman-era house, repurposed objects once again make an appearance. Like David Fesl’s palm-sized works, which are dotted throughout the lime-washed walls of the house. These small assemblages bring together disparate objects, crushed cans, feathers, sink sieves, broken shuttlecocks, and other materials whose origins are not entirely decipherable. Untitled, the works again resist captioning, offering instead the practice of bricolage as a way of producing new connections and kin.
These everyday objects are presented alongside “Tears,” by the duo Small but Dangerous. Here, used handkerchiefs become canvases stretched across wooden frames. The reworked rejectamenta of our grandparents’ generation is displayed here in an empty home, triggering all sorts of memories, both intimate and domestic.
Underneath the rickety staircase of the Dorambari home, the building awakens with Nika Špan’s “Who is there / Who’s there?” In this nook, an audio piece of knocking sounds rings out from behind an old wooden door. There are no markings to signal the work, which means the sounds are first registered as real knocks, resulting in a pleasant kind of fright.
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“Untitled” by David Fesl and “Tears” by Small but Dangerous. Photo by Tughan Anit. Courtesy of Autostrada Biennale.
Upstairs, the call to prayer that sounds from the neighbouring Bajrakli Mosque seems just as prearranged and uncanny against “Beiti” – my house – by Laurent Mareschal. An eeriness made more so by Mareschal’s subject: spices poured on the floor into shapes that recall the geometry of Islamic art. Drawing on spices from the culinary traditions of Palestine and the Middle East writ large, Mareschal references traditions devastated by colonial violence.
These themes are not lost on the house; an architectural relic of the Ottoman Empire, which both Kosovo and Palestine once belonged to — an empire whose fall would trigger countless displacements and violent upheavals in its wake. Here, the fragile work brings the building into its fold — the remnants of an architectural legacy that in Europe has, in some instances, seen deliberate erasure. In Prizren, by way of war and Yugoslav urban planners run amok, who, in ‘modernizing’ the city, left scars, like the lone minaret of the Arasta Mosque down the road. More recently, unregulated turbo urbanism has seen centuries-old Ottoman houses give way to car parks.
The subject of history emerges again in the Shani Effendi House, a site that has gone through a series of transformations, from a private residence to a landmark of civic gatherings in the Yugoslav period. It is now beautifully refitted as a white cube. The venue also boasts the work of deceased artists Simon Shiroka and Alije Vokshi, figures who have taken their place in the country’s art historical canon as examples of Kosovar modernist art. Shiroka and Vokshi’s work operates in two different ways here owing to this history. They can be read as objects of art or as historical objects in themselves, citations of another era.
In Vokshi’s work, “Still Life,” the viewer is greeted by two large paintings, abstract voids with gestural brushstrokes in muddy browns, olive greens, and mustard yellows, with more minor accents in fleshy pinks. This treatment sees the faint outlines of traditional still life objects and references to Albanian culture bleed into the background, making the distinction with the foreground barely perceptible. Shiroka’s work, similarly, draws on vernacular motifs; here, in filigree, intricate silverwork that takes the form of people, myths and symbols, in feverish dream-like tableaux.
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“Still Life” by Alije Vokshi and “Untitled” by Simon Shiroka. Photo by Tughan Anit. Courtesy of Autostrada Biennale.
These modernist reworkings of traditions complement the ethos of the biennial at large. But beyond their formal qualities, the work is also drawn on as a historical artefact. Out of these objects, Shkololli teases out connections with contemporary Kosovar artists, forming forefathers and genealogies across generations. This neat telling of art history, however, betrays the much more radical framing of history that the biennial makes elsewhere through ellipses and ruptures.
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“Untitled” by Brilant Milazimi and “Untitled” by Blerta Hashani. Photo by Tughan Anit. Courtesy of Autostrada Biennale.
For example, when paired together, Blerta Hashani’s contemporary abstractions of rural life in Kosovo and Vokshi’s earlier abstractions begin to mirror one another. Similarly, a kind ancestry is alluded to between Shiroka and the more recent work of Brilant Milazimi’s, whose blotted and inky figures are displayed next door to Shiroka’s figurative filigree. While these pairings are visually complementary, this linear framing risks relegating Shiroka and Vokshi’s work to the past, so that they read against their histories rather than contemporaneously.
This linear ordering of time is altogether abandoned at the biennale’s landmark, Vadim Fishkin’s “Lighthouse.” An installation that sees a 19th-century clock tower transformed. Turned from a dial that once measured time, to a different kind of guide now beaming red in punctuated beats; the live-streamed murmur of Fishkin’s heart. While this signal helps to guide viewers at night, it more importantly warns of shallow waters below – the slippery slopes of historicism on show at the Archeological Museum of Prizren downstairs, where more of Fishkin’s work is displayed.
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“Lighthouse” and “Dark Times” by Vadim Fishkin. Photo by Tughan Anit. Courtesy of Autostrada Biennale.
“Dark Times,” like the “Lighhouse” above, sees Fishkin transform a series of clocks in various makes, shapes and sizes by totally blackening them out, their glass spraypainted. The hanging objects at first look like minimalist paintings, the subtle sounds of ticking dials eventually help point in the right direction. Presented here beside an archaeological exhibit of Prizren’s past, spanning from the periods of the Neolithic to the Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman, these voided clocks blast open the museum’s linear rendering of history. A gesture that sets free our historiographical imaginations, seeing cracks and fissures open where there was once the simple ordering of cause and effect.
The rendition of history seen here and elsewhere at the biennale, is Autostrada and Shkololli’s best offering: a past brought forward, whose treasures and traumas are open to intervention.
The 5th edition of Autostrada Biennale opened on July 5, 2025, and runs until October 5, 2025, across several sites in Prizren, Kosovo. For more information, visit autostradabiennale.org
Feature Image: “Who is there / Who’s there?,” Nika Špan. Photo by Tughan Anit. Courtesy of Autostrada Biennale.
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- This story was originally written in English.