Residency 2:Dardan ZhegrovaSwiss Institute (SI)
New York
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Acknowledging the value of art education, Balkan…Projects, in collaboration with the Swiss Institute New York, offers a three-months residency program to artists currently living and working in the Balkan region. The residency is unique, as it supports artists beyond the standardized processes associated with art production, commission, and exhibition-making. With Swiss Institute serving as a liaison between the artist and the city, the residents are given a rare opportunity to live and learn, research and intellectually engage, reflect and work at their own pace, in an independent and generative environment. The participants were selected by an international jury of esteemed art professionals: Dora Budor, Aleksandra Domanović, Zoran Erić, Siniša Ilić, and Bojan Sarcević.
Dardan Zhegrova’s works are object- and performance-oriented, and are more frequently inspired by poems that serve as the standing point for the conception of a new work. His texts relate to partially fictional and actually experienced events, which are mostly recounted in a first-person perspective. Oftentimes the narrator addresses an (imaginary) counterpart, sought after by the artist. There are no pronouns like she and he – the narrative unfolds between the I and the You. Here the border between the artist as a subject and the person addressed often seems to blur. This dissolution of the conventions of a classical narrative form can also be seen in relation to structures of temporality in poetry, where the future, present, and past seem to merge. This collapse of the different boundaries in Zhegrova’s work also reflects his queer identity, which oscillates between female and male attributes, and deliberately rejects and transcends a normative understanding of gender.
Bio
Dardan Zhegrova (1991) lives and works in Prishtina, Kosovo, the city where he was born. Selected solo exhibitions and performances of his include: I Dreamt of a Hybrid of Past and Now, Fragile, Berlin (2020); We All Run around the Backyard, Bazement, Prishtina (2019); Lucky Pierre, Boxing Club, Prishtina, and Bazement, Tirana, Albania (2018); Lucky Pierre: Crush at the Other Table, Bob’s Pogo Bar at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany (2018); The Anchor of My Own Landscape, LambdaLambdaLambda, Prishtina (2018); and You Look Like You Know How to Treat a Body, with trio Heinz Herbert, Gessnerallee Theater, Zurich, Switzerland (2015). His forthcoming projects include a solo exhibition at P.E.T. Projects, Athens, Greece (2021). He is a recipient of the Gjon Mili Award, National Gallery of Kosovo, Prishtina (2017), and of the Artists of Tomorrow Award, part of the Young Visual Artists Awards program, Pristhina (2016).