Autostrada Biennale 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.