ART-PRESENTATION: Edi Rama
Edi Rama’s most noted impact on Tirana has been the many kiosk demolitions in the city during his mayorship. Rama’s “Return to Identity” project rid the city of many illegally constructed buildings on municipal lands. His “Clean and Green” project in 2000 resulted in the production of 96,700 m² of green land and parks in the city. He also ordered the painting of many old buildings, in what has come to be known as Edi Rama colours (very bright yellow, green, violet). Rama’s critics claimed that he focused too much attention on cosmetic changes without fixing any of the major problems such as shortages of drinking water and electricity.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Marian Goodman Gallery Archive
Edi Rama in his solo exhibition at Marian Goodman Gallery in New York presents a selection of colored pen on document paper drawings, hung on wallpaper made from them and many others, emulating the walls of Rama’s office in Tirana. The exhibition also presents a group of his new ceramic sculptures and a suite of the “Inversion Drawings” created with his long-term collaborator, Anri Sala. What Rama gradually realized as Mayor of Tirana, then leader of the opposition, and since 2013 as a Prime Minister steering his country through a period of transformation, was that his drawings were neither a diversionary activity nor an aesthetic indulgence, but becoming an increasingly elucidatory necessity. Later Rama not only started exhibiting his drawings as artworks, but took the decision to extend them, as printed wallpaper, across the walls of his ministerial office. Also on presentation are a series of works made in collaboration with Anri Sala entitled “Inversion Drawings”, they are constructed by Sala working on the verso of a selection of Rama’s drawings, revealing the ghosts of their reverse images, as if “Creating space where there appears to be none”. Displayed in this exhibition for the first time are ceramic sculptures that seem an embodiment of some of the palette and ruinscapes of an earlier Rama-Sala collaboration, the video work “Dammi i Colori” (2003). The artist explains that the reason he’d so many colored pens within hand’s reach on his office desk in the first place, and hence such a broad palette for his drawings then sculptures, is his using them all over architects’ drawings to propose painting a kaleidoscope of colors that transformed the facades of Tirana public housing, the social project on which the video was based.
Info: Marian Goodman Gallery, 24 West 57 Street, New York, Duration: 11/11-23/12/16, Days & Hours: Mon-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.mariangoodman.com
