Summer School as School 2023
The Public Program
August 18, 2023, 20:00
Artist Presentations by Agrina Vllasaliu and Sanja Anđelkovic, winners of the Artists of Tomorrow and Mangelos awards
Presentation by Sanja Anđelković and Agrina Vllasaliu
Venue: Boxing Club, Mark Isaku 8, 10000 Prishtina, Republic of Kosovo
Biographies
Sanja Anđelković is an audio-visual-textual artist engaged with research in the framework of a 'documentary-fiction-speculative practice' and approaching the initial themes of political ecology, history and everyday life. Her artistic strategies employ collaborations. She is engaged with researches that concentrate on context specific uses of art, which implies a factor of site-specificity, time- specificity guided by an interest in developing or re-collecting private or institutional collections. The significance of working with these archives she sees as a context for exploring alternative narratives, storytelling and archiving knowledge.
Her practice is heavily based in research (although predominantly hybridized into speculation), mining through archives and scientific fields to explore systems of knowledge in the field of history, anthropology, entomology, ethnography etc, and to question how they transform representation and ways of seeing. Through performance, animation, installation, sound, video and text, she analyzes systems of historical information.
Agrina Vllasaliu was born on August 8, 1990 in Prishtina but grew up in Berlin, Germany since she was two years old. Between 91' and 92' her parents decided to leave Kosovo for some time due to the critical situation. When the situation in Kosovo became worse and war broke out in 1998, it quickly became clear that returning was not an option for that time. Despite the experience of the war from afar, Agrina’s parents were influenced by this event. In her early childhood, she experienced the powerlessness of her parents in the face of the war and how this circumstance took place parallel to their everyday life in Germany. Her life in Germany was strongly influenced by growing up between the Albanian and German cultures. In her elementary school age, Vllasaliu attended the German school and once a week also the Albanian school in Berlin, which was mostly organized by people who had also fled Kosovo, in order to give the younger generations a connection to the language and the culture. At an early age, it became clear to her that she saw her profession in the creative and artistic field. After graduating from high school in 2010, she worked on her applications to art universities in Germany and began her art studies at the University of the Arts (UDK) in 2011/12 in combination with geography studies at the Humboldt University (HU) in Berlin.
In the UDK, she studied since the third semester in the class of Ursula Neugebauer, where she graduated with a master's degree at the end of April 2022. In Ursula’s class, they studied conceptual strategies of art and the perception of space with mixed media. Together with the students and changing lecturers such as Clemens Krauss (medical doctor and artist), Frederick Foert (artist), Thorsten Goldberg (artist in public space) and Wiebke Hahn (curator), they organized a number of exhibitions and exchanges with other classes. In addition to the regular and annual exhibitions at the end of the semester in the UDK building, they realized joint projects and exhibitions in Berlin, Vienna and Shanghai.