Bekim Hasaj & Valentina Gelain: Dripping Cavities
November 4, 2023 to January 14, 2024
Inspired by different regions and spaces of Ostrobothnia, Bekim Hasaj and Valentina Gelain present dialogue and encounters in their multi-artistic exhibition project Dripping Cavities using video art, photography, digital and plastic art, and painting.
The international contemporary artists Valentina Gelain (IT) and Bekim Hasaj (ALB), who live nowadays in Maalahti, will be the last artists in the exhibition program of Vaasa City Museums in Vaasa City Art Gallery. From 2024, the space will be managed by the Vaasa Artists Guild.
In the exhibition, the artist Bekim Hasaj is presenting the ongoing investigation Scanning Landscape, through which he reconsiders to represent the landscape out of its conventional-historical frames. This inquiry is followed by the urgency to know and then impress the intimate relationship with the surrounding in a visual yet original and personal abstraction.
The multidisciplinary work The Grey Hour by Valentina Gelain, highlights how we can relate emotionally to the environment to express our inner mental and emotive states, showing a frame of mind connected to apathy, the inability to act, the difficulty of self-relating and, specifically, the dissociative disorders.
The projects were inspired, finding expression and concreteness, by the territories and spaces of Ostrobothnia in 2021. The two works, echoing each other and finding resonance in their duality, open a dialogue that finds voice in the shared experience and collaboration of the artists, as well as the areas where they have been realized.
Therefore, the geographical aspect and the objective/subjective (re)interpretation of the landscape, together with the exploratory and experimental line are decisive and form the core of Dripping Cavities.
The character and research of the two artists along with the plurality of and techniques such as video, photography, sculpture, painting accentuate the nature of the works and offers the public a varied scenario of content and form.
Being led by patterns of an imprinted meditation flowing through the encounters and junctions of a reality that has always been there and is now uncovered, unrolled and delineated in an even more intricate map of real paths and mental labyrinths, where one blurs having the possibility of recomposing, finding oneself in a myriad of facets ready to merge.
The exhibition Dripping Cavities is encouraging dialogue and confrontation on the awareness of the other and ourselves through finding expression in the environment and its nuances and bringing out the territory through perceptions, colours, shapes, as well as patterns that, by concretizing the almost/now invisible, refresh the viewer’s gaze with renewed curiosity.
The projects have been supported by Svensk-Österbottniska Samfundet, The Swedish Cultural Foundation in Finland, TAIKE and The Gröndahl Brothers’ Foundation.
Bekim Hasaj (1990, Bajram Curri) is currently based in Ostrobothnia, Finland. Seeking an approach towards transdisciplinarity, being open and ready to experiment outside the primary field of study, his practice remains strongly connected to the research on color, sign, and painting in addition to other ‘tools’ and mediums outside of it.
He is interested in psychology, philosophy, and social and anthropological themes, developing and studying them in a form of self-analysis and self-perception. Hasaj likes to reflect in terms of co-existence, visible and not, known or unknown, which he sees as a parable of the own process of art making.
Valentina Gelain (1992, Feltre) is currently based in Ostrobothnia, Finland. Through subjective experience and introspection, Gelain investigates issues related to human existentialism, drawing directly from the mental and emotional, symbolic and dreamlike sphere.
Thanks to a plural opening of perceptions, different research themes such as inner conflicts, mental landscapes and redemption are touched upon, through a synergy between form and content, image and intention. Interdisciplinary artist, Gelain explores subjects and figurations through different languages and means of communication, which can help to express her work vision best.
Valentina Gelain, The Grey Hour, 2021. Still frame: Valentina Gelain