Introduction
The present issue of Art Studies focuses on the theme of beginnings, and specifically on three turning points in Albanian modern and contemporary history that paved the way for new beginnings (whether ultimately “good”, “bad”, or false ones – and anything and everything in-between for that matter): the Antifascist National Liberation War, the Ideological and Cultural Revolution, and the collapse of the communist regime in the early 1990s. It is only fitting then that the contributions to this issue of Art Studies themselves represent, in more ways than one, new beginnings.
Open archive – a review
The advent of the coronavirus pandemic seems to have sparked a surge in archival-minded exhibitions in museums (and other kinds of art spaces) the world over, which was noticeable especially in the aftermath of the first wave of the pandemic during the summer of 2020. Many of these shows have been permeated by a sense of “getting back to basics”, as it were. This is not surprising, given that the coronavirus pandemic has put into question the ability of museums to perform the most basic of tasks, such as (physically) opening their doors to visitors for example. This state of heightened precariousness has prompted a heightened awareness of the museum’s fundamental functions, which are the preservation and exhibition of its permanent collection. In addition to the coronavirus pandemic, the renewed intensity of anti-colonial and anti-racist struggles in the United States and elsewhere around the globe has led to the permanent collections – and collecting practices – of museums being put under the microscope for reasons that are decidedly less flattering but that politically speaking are potentially much more productive.
Politics of installation as politics of the archive
In this paper I discuss three recent exhibitions focusing on the communist era archives of the Ministry of Defense (Bunk’Art I), the Ministry of Interior Affairs (Bunk’Art II), and the Albanian communist regime’s secret police, namely, Sigurimi i Shtetit (House of Leaves). What is remarkable about the Bunk’Art I, Bunk’Art II, and House of Leaves exhibitions is the way in which they self-consciously appropriate and exploit the “language” or the conventions of contemporary artistic and curatorial installations, i.e., embodied perspective, immersion, theatricality, etc., to mediate the relationship between contemporary audiences and the communist past. The question, then, is whether the use of the “language” or conventions of contemporary artistic and curatorial installations in these exhibitions succeeds in making the communist past more readily accessible to contemporary audiences, or whether it makes it even harder to read.Traditionally discussed in terms of being an especially democratic art form by virtue of opening up the space of the work of art to a community of visitors, more recently critics such as Boris Groys have drawn attention to the nondemocratic, violent act by which the space of the installation is created in the first place, namely, through the symbolic privatization of the public space of the exhibition over which the installation artist exerts absolute control. As such, artistic and curatorial installations reveal “the hidden sovereign dimension of the contemporary democratic order that politics, for the most part, tries to conceal”.2 I will show that the Bunk’Art I, Bunk’Art II, and House of Leaves exhibitions not only reveal the excess of sovereignty that underpins the contemporary Albanian political order, but also a vision of politics as installation art – or contemporary art exhibition – applied to an entire country.