Autostrada Biennale is pleased to announce its artists, ideas, venues, and dates of its third edition:
What If a Journey…
Prizren: July 17–September 11, 2021
What If a Journey… is an exhibition about the unfinished. It can be a road, an electrification map, a house, a flower field, a story, a relationship, or a country. It is an exhibition that takes incompleteness as an invitation to respond, to relate, and to grow.
What If a Journey… is an exhibition about two ends of the road that meet in between a host and a guest, in between the diasporic and the local, in between infrastructure and intimacy.
What If a Journey… is also an exhibition about art as a form of recovery from everyday traps. It takes you on a road trip starting in the center of Prishtina, continuing along the Lumbardhi River in Prizren, and ending in an art bar in Peja.
“In our first research trip to Prizren in the fall of 2020, we listened to stories in need of being heard: from artists, organizers, food ethnologists, a Romani activist, a heritage conservator, an urban sociologist, and a philosopher, among many others. The exhibition was created in response to those stories. Additionally, a woven cluster of overlapping roads by artist Valbona Zherka offered us an orientation map composed from river flows, migration paths, positive irregularities, and u-turns. The third Autostrada Biennale is an invitation to embark on an incomplete journey, in and out of Kosovo—to Berlin, Istanbul, Warsaw, and back. Or somewhere in between.”
— Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu and Joanna Warsza, curators of the third Autostrada Biennale
Autostrada Biennale was established by two artists and a pedagogue in 2014. As the only contemporary art institution in Prizren, Kosovo, it functions on two speeds: one is a physical exhibition taking place in public space every two years, the second is a long-term educational center in the former KFOR camp, where the exhibition preparation process is open to the public, making creation of the artworks a form of learning and critical thinking.