December
Flaka Haliti
Nikoleta Marković, Ana Vilenica, Tanja Marković: What conclusion, standpoint or observation comes out of the work Me, You and Everyone We Know, in which you try to address issues regarding the position of male and female artists in art history and within systems of power? Who does this work address and what was the reaction to it, if any?
Flaka Haliti: Me, You and Everyone We Know is sort of a new work, shown only once so far at Press to Exit in Skopje. In fact, I do not see it as a work that attempts to provoke reactions. It is more a reaction itself. It emerged as a result and continuation of my experience after the work My Balls. It’s a video animation diagram, where I try to describe the position of male and female artists in art history and within systems of power through a mind map. Quite often those experiences are presented as puzzles, so I just wanted to position ‘the puzzle’ and make it a bit clearer, primarily for myself. But, the diagram keeps moving, illustrating the difficulty of freezing those positions, and then there is the added complexity of reading it all, making sense of it.
In the video piece Our Death/Others Dinner you deal with the heavy question of addressing the issue of the victim in the public sphere. By posing the question of whether victims are victimized again if ‘used’ in an artwork, do you also regard your interest for the way women are positioned ’on the market’ within the art system in the same way, that is, questioning whether a women artist is or would be discriminated against if she deals with her sex or gender issues in her works? And what would be the way out this trap for women artists in your experience?
Of course, the oppressed position has existed since the 19th century, when the division between men’s and women’s creativity was total, when women were perceived as objects, not subjects. In the book Women, Art And Society, Whitney Chadwick explains once more that what we learn from history is that a ‘woman of genius’ does not exist, and when she does, she is a man (which is the same as what happened in my experience with ’not having balls’). So the status of the exception comes as tendency to exoticize the woman artist as an isolated example and then to use her unique status as a weapon to undermine her achievement. Yet, what I’ve learned so far is that no matter how much you succeed as a woman artist, your achievement is going always to be measured against the surrounds instead of being celebrated for itself. And I do try to show this in the work Me, You and Everyone We Know, with how I classify the diagram. Anyway, I think is we should try and push things more in the direction of what Jerry Saltz tried to point out when he said about the German artist Charline von Heyl: “Von Heyl is not a good artist because she's a female who paints but because of how she paints.” Anyway, more dangerous than what I would consider this trap is the existence of the latent misogyny between women themselves. I really try to understand where it comes from. One answer simply could be that this world we live in, in its continuous iteration of proof that there are ‘limited places’ for us, causes us to only compete with one another. As a result, the challenge becomes smaller. But we also forget that this can the exact place where the rivalry between women begins, a rivalry for those limited places ’allowed’ to us by society.
How would you describe your position on the local art scene now? Did it change?
It did, and it didn’t, it depends who you talk to. I still hear stories from different international curators, that when they go to Kosovo in search of a local artist, they still come back with the information that there is no contemporary woman artist in Kosovo, at least not ones worth mentioning. And this is only because some of the representatives of the local scene insist on perpetuating this belief. But if you ask the Station Center for Contemporary Art in Prishtina (which since 2006 has played a very important role for contemporary art in Kosovo) they would present another reality. I find it important to mention that Station is the one and only art institution whch truly believes in the value of women artists’ work in Kosovo, without outlining any sexual difference in their practice of how they perceive and present them.
For the complete conversation visit http://www.uzbuna.org/en/journal/conversations-new-feminisam-and-art/me-you-and-everyone-we-know