All Images Will Disappear, One Day
4th Autostrada Biennale
07.07 – 09.09.2023

All Images Will Disappear, One Day is an exhibition about what makes and unmakes us, what entangles and disentangles us from ourselves, about freedoms beyond choices, imaginaries that flow despite and across borders. It is an exhibition about collective autobiographies stored in cultural archives, those deep reservoirs of words, objects, patterns, feelings, or misunderstandings. It is about connecting with the unknown. What is unarchivable reminds us that all images disappear, one day, slipping into a temporal void. Yet art survives as a language of resistance and resilience, a way to validate our existence in the world, a horizon beyond imperial visual regimes.

The biennale takes you on a journey around former NATO hangars, where the core of the exhibition sits, and then down into the streets of Prizren, and farther to Prishtina and Mitrovica. It starts with an artwork that first took root in 2021, which follows the sun: Agnes Denes’s Sunflower Fields (2021–ongoing). Another thirty art projects await you, asking, in their metaphorical languages: Which images do we hold on to and why? How do certain past and future memories, be it of a puppet theater, a typographer, a sacred book, an endemic flower, a blackbird, a clandestine gallery, a children’s hideout, a nomadic playground, or a destroyed museum, persistently, and somehow unconsciously, live on? How does the past stop to form the present but not the future? And how do we fail to stick to the values that supposedly unite us all?

The exhibition, in accordance with its Latin etymology, ex-hibere, is a complex process of making something hidden visible. It is an invitation to travel through a set of multifaceted, social, poetic, and ephemeral art pieces across the three cities. It is a constellation of images that will disappear and open space for the construction of life anew. Therefore, it is about staying with what is difficult, but also about letting go at the same time. The exhibition promises unpredictable encounters in and out of Prizren, the Balkans, Europe outside Europe, and the planet. And finally, it is about hope and persistence, in spite of it all.

Artists of the 4th Autostrada Biennale

Prizren
Opening: July 7–8, 2023
Agnes Denes
Anna Boghiguian*
Bajram Mehmeti
Bella Rune
Blerta Haziraj*
Bouchra Khalili
Dardan Zhegrova*
Darinka Pop-Mitić*
Hong–Kai Wang
Gözde İlkin*
Ivo Nikić*
Kameelah Janan Rasheed
Kostas Bassanos*
Luchezar Boyadjiev
Michael Rakowitz*
Mila Panić*
Nathan Gray and the Juluwarlu Group Aboriginal Corporation*
Nil Yalter
Neda Saeedi* ,
Núria Güell
Open Group*
Oscar Lara
Sebastián Díaz Morales & Ruangrupa
School of Mutants*
Selma Selman
Vatra Gallery*
Xhevdet Xhafa

Prishtina
Opening: July 9, 2023, 13:00 p.m.
Agnes Denes
Hera Büyüktaşcıyan*

Mitrovica
Opening: July 9, 2023, 19:00 p.m.
Alban Muja*
Rena Rädle & Vladan Jeremić*

*New commissions

Curated by
Joanna Warsza
Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu

CuratorLab participants/curators of the public program:
Andria Nyberg Forshage
Áron Rossman-Kiss
Giulia Menegale
Giovanni Giacomo Paolin
Hana Halilaj
Hala Alnaji
Hampus Bergander
Ieva Laube
Maximilian Lehner
Orestis Mavroudis

Short Bios of curators:

Joanna Warsza is an interdependent curator, editor, art writer and educator. She co-curated the Polish Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022, with the work of Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, the first Roma artist in any national pavilion. Since 2014, Warsza has been program director of CuratorLab at Konstfack University of the Arts. She has curated numerous biennials, city projects, exhibitions, and conferences, such as the 7th Berlin Biennale (as associate curator) or Public Art Munich 2018. Warsza works at the intersection of art and the public realm, engaging with such subjects as left-wing feminist histories, decolonisation in Eastern Europe, memory work, the cusp of art, activism, political desire and performativity, situated knowledges, and questions of asymmetries or ethics in socially engaged practices. With her background in theater, gender, and performance studies, she often takes a dramaturgical approach to exhibition making, where time or context matter as much as space and form. Originally from Warsaw she lives in Berlin.

Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu is an independent curator and writer, guest professor and program co-leader in the Graduate School, UdK Berlin and visiting professor in the HfBK Braunschweig. She acts between exhibition making and public programming, singular languages and collective energies, worldly immersions and political cosmologies. Övül was a curator at Steirischer Herbst; co-curated different sections of 10th, 13th and 14th Istanbul Biennials; and organized Public Programs for dOCUMENTA (13). Originally from Ankara, she lives in Berlin.

Övül and Joanna have co-curated the 3. Autostrada Biennale in 2021, 12. Survival Kit in Riga also in 2021 as well as Die Balkone 1 and Die Balkone 2, an exhibition in windows and balconies in Berlin, where they both live and are neighbours.