A FEW WORDSabout VIGAN

Nimani’s paintings are thus studies of the changing image of the city; they hold a certain level of distillation with references to past times and of the present. Further, they make visible what has been “lost” (or potentially will be lost soon), namely the erasure of modernist architecture; regional identity. The artist has been using repetition as a tool to comment on such changing urban, architectural and rural scenery in Kosovo. Thus appears the question; can an artistic practice developed in resistance to a city‘s changing urban identity become an aesthetic gesture of resistance? Vigan Nimani`s paintings give an affirmative answer to this. What we encounter in his oeuvre is an ambiguous result which embodies multiple temporalities between the past and now.

Though Nimani’s oeuvre holds juxtapositions of historical sources and geographical references; yet each input is blurry. Also striking here is his unusual preference for cropped compositions. To give an example, the artist never portrays a full narrative; instead choosing a single detail with which to arouse the curiosity of the viewer. “It is important for me to paint architectural elements isolated from their habitat. I want to create a timeless feeling through my paintings to offer viewers different flavours and moods. This is why I leave out symbols or time references from the original photos,” explains Nimani. This further explains the artist’s motivation; that beyond other connotations of Yugoslav socialist modernization, or a certain obsessed nostalgia towards the past, it is the architecture’s aesthetic value that appeals him most.

Zooming in on these paintings, often Nimani pictures a landscape, a fragment of a building, or figures that are separated from their surroundings. Rarely appear human figures at a distance, and mostly alone. All these don`t immediately suggest itself; where we are, or what time we are. Despite an abstraction the material evidence (traces of socialist-era architecture, or monuments) give some hints; and their pale colours might remind of late 80s aesthetics, instead of the present. Yet the artist, by appropriating these figures, here acts as a middleman, a performative agent; “an agent of exchange, linkage and transformation”^.1

Nimani’s paintings are not mere representations of the socialist period, instead bear a rather timeless and placeless look. The dialectic of repetition here is clear, what is repeated makes repetition into the new. And their minimalist visual language that is free of overabundant symbolism further mediates the experience. Still, it is maybe not a coincidence that Nimani’s paintings trigger a certain melancholy. Despite taking its source material directly from the past, they respond to what one feels and experiences today in Kosovo. For the old parts of the cities are disappearing every day, the role of the artist - if not able to help preserve what is left - is to become a mediator.

For a couple of years Nimani took a break from painting practice and instead focused on documenting the streets of Prishtina, photographing the examples of modernist architecture. After taking photographs for more than a decade, the artist owns an archive of hundreds of images which document his hometown’s rapidly changing appearance. “Between late 1940s and 1980s Prishtina was rebuilt, replacing traditional architecture with the modernist one. Today, something similar is happening. Some of those buildings which I photographed don’t exist anymore. They are slowly disappearing and we are losing a part of our cultural heritage” says Nimani. Indeed Kosovo has been a case study of erasing the rich regional urban culture in the name of Modernity. Architect Gezim Pacarizi also points to “Imposed Modernity” that Kosovo has been going through since the beginning of the XX century. Pacarizi explains that similar to how the socialist government has destroyed neighbourhoods built on a human scale to make way for new buildings, enlarged streets and straightened the rivers, making room for large modern structures took place; today another erasure is taking place; “Modernity has been a synonym of destruction and foreign aesthetics“.²

It is nevertheless in this destruction that Nimani’s paintings become a form of artistic resistance, gaining another meaning. Addressing the notion of visibility and erasure, through appropriating figures from the past, the artist indeed refuses to allow their disappearance from collective memory; but points to their very existence. In this movement of time, temporarily, he re-takes, re-peats what “has been”. And repetition is here an active gesture; “a movement forward instead of backwards”.³ This shift further adds a new dimension, a certain contradiction to Nimani’s work too. After years of striving to place his paintings outside of time or place, they have now become an archive of a very specific era. Yet the artist welcomes these two realities that coexist in his paintings. Moving beyond intention, Nimani is also aware of this newly acquired documentary value of his photographs; and this, indeed, gradually has become the main goal for his photography.⁴

These coexisting realities, indeed, ensures the work’s penness; the process of attending Nimani`s oeuvre is not contained by a single framework. To Nimani, this is left open for the viewer; for the artist it is not necessarily crucial to make these references explicit, as he is not opting for creating correlations other than physical one; “Some get inspired from technical pictorial aspects, some from an apocalyptic, alienating atmosphere. For some, it raises attention toward socialist architecture and aesthetics of that time. And this is exactly what I wanted to achieve through my paintings — to not be explicit in any way”. ⁵

The artist crafts a meticulous and multi-layered world in his paintings; yet thanks to their dreaming temporality viewers could relate to them without a need to unpack further references, but experiencing sensations. Eventually, it is through fragmented representations and story-like images that Vigan Nimani communicates, instead of creating stories.