Firstly, the exhibition serves as the place (topoi) where this poetic (poiesis) skill (techne) is manifested. Secondly, the work as a manifestation of „techno-aesthetics“ is a formed symbiosis between aesthetic because it’s technical, and technical because it’s aesthetic. Through this techno-aesthetic manifestation, the exhibition takes the form of a technotopia. Thus, it becomes the place where painting is not silent poetry but where it transforms into the poetics of noise.
As a result of this white noise, it alters the relationship between the real and the imaginary, the original and the artificial, marking this moment as the aesthetic experience of hyperreality. The aesthetic experience of hyperreality is made possible when a triptych of components is fused: painting, noise, and apparatuses, which are more than evident in the exhibition of the artist Shkamb Jaka.
Shkamb Jaka, Technotopia: Is This Hyperreal?
Shkamb Jaka, Technotopia: Is This Hyperreal?
In the work „Dimensions of Narcissus,“ through the tropes that we find in surrealism and expressionism, we are offered a two-dimensional experience in the actual painting, and as a potential through the aforementioned interventions of technical images, it tends to offer us a four-dimensional experience. The intertext of the work seems to describe the dimension of the hypermodern narcissist who, through apparatuses, tries to remove the burden of originality from us. Therefore, the fusion between the painting and the apparatus does not attempt to project similarity but rather hyper-similarity as the cold moment of the death of originality that Baudrillard would say. This cold regime is not silence but noise. Silence belongs to the plane of atoms because they die, while bit-shaped particles belong to noise and are therefore eternal. Man is mortal, but the image is immortal.
Shkamb Jaka, Technotopia: Is This Hyperreal?
The work „Frozen Thoughts“ is significant enough to decode the concept of the exhibition. It presents waveforms that at first glance give the impression of a Möbius strip. Meanwhile, Shkamb’s strip is different because he constantly chants in the form of a litany to present us with hyperreal coldness.
Apparatus as works are cold, and sometimes our thoughts about them. This state of coldness is in sync with the inner noise of the artist, that noise in uncertainty like in Gaspar Noé’s film „Enter the Void“ when we enter virtual jouissance.
Shkamb Jaka, Technotopia: Is This Hyperreal?
In this technotopia, you will be confronted with the sublime abomination of cold noise presented through the permanent repetition of geometric shapes, apparatuses, and white noise. Finally, the exhibition that has been transformed into a technotopia is not a reduced answer to complex questions but is a complex question about complexities. Therefore, Shkambi’s works have a syntagma in the form of a question for us: Is this hyper-real?
Exhibition: Shkamb Jaka, Technotopia: Is This Hyperreal?
Exhibition duration: 29.03 – 28.04
Shkamb Jaka (1997) was born in Gjakovë, lives and works in Pristina. He studied in the field of Fine Arts – Painting at the University of Pristina and graduated Masters in 2023. In addition to holding two personal exhibitions, „DisDeKodim“ at Menza Ramiz Sadiku, 2020 and „Spooky Action at a Distance“ at Paper Gallery, 2021, he has presented his work in various collective exhibitions, was a finalist of „Artists of Tomorrow“ at Stacion – Center for Contemporary Art, 2020 and 2023, participant in the exhibition „Based on a true story“ at the National Gallery of Kosovo, 2021 as well as recently with the presentation of the work in the „SOLO“ exhibition at the Center for Narrative Practice, 2023 – www.instagram.com/jakashkamb/.
