Curated and organized by Blerta Hocia and Vesa Qena

Humanitarian Law Center Kosovo is pleased to invite you to the exhibition showcasing Lana Čmajčanin's video installation titled 'A Change is Gonna Come II.'This event is part of the Documentation Center Kosovo program, which aims to present artistic works with a focus on Dealing with the Past.

Additionally, the event will include a discussion with the artist, offering an opportunity to delve deeper into her creative process and the themes explored in her works.

Čmajčanin's art practice explores the impact of political and social power structures, control mechanisms, and questions of responsibility and manipulation. She delves into topics such as geopolitical and structural violence, the politics of memory, nationalist political practices, and the neoliberal management of trauma.

'A Change is Gonna Come II' is a video installation created in 2018. Starting from the assumption that there is no innocent landscape, the work reflects on different experiences of the sea and the landscape, focusing on uncanny relation between sea as the site of leisure and beauty, and sea as the mass grave. The sea is not only a tourist destination; it is a political landscape on which the divisions among national territories are drawn up. It is also a migration road, the only road to get to another shore, and it has become a mass grave for many who put all their hopes into this final journey. The sea horizon is also a philosophical-poetic landscape and a zone of contemplation that puts into question geopolitical divisions and power mechanisms that determine the constructions of identities and territories. Symbolically, in contradiction with an almost unchanged and static landscape, the title itself implies transformation, as well as it provokes questioning about the meaning of geopolitical and climatic changes. At the same time, it offers a possibility of imagining a new space, a signal for the politics of hope and its utopian inscriptions.

The artist talk will be held in English.

Supported by: Swiss Confederation - Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs and NED.