Qënderesë Deda is a 34-year-old artist who lives and works between Pristina, Kosovo and Ljubljana, Slovenia, and the last of the six visiting artists at MGLC as part of the EU project In from the Margins in 2022.
Her first experience of a refugee dates to the time when she was 10 years old. "Because of my experience, I question whether it is ethical to involve other people to open up about these sensitive issues," she explains.
In her practice, Deda combines different media, from photography, drawing, writing and design, to video, often taking on the role of an object and a subject simultaneously.
She intertwined personal writings, poetry and graffiti, questioning identity, freedom and restrictions that are imposed on people in present-day society. Although her works appear to be very personal, intimate even, she deals with the phenomena of her immediate surroundings, as she describes it.
During the residency, she dealt with the idea of how we see ourselves and our worries and how we see the worries of others, which is an attempt to bring closer intimacy and communication between each other. The residency ended with a discussion event, which aims to establish a safe space for talking about worries.
She stated:"The space I wanted to create is a kind of safe space for artists. In a way, it's like a therapeutic environment, because I think that's typical of all professions in general, like ours, when we usually talk about our artwork or when we have to bid for something or present a project. Even when we want to present our ideas, we have to be really good to be somewhere. There is not much space where we can be vulnerable."
Deda created 60 T-shirts, prints and costume with images of our worries, and printed a set of board game cards which deals with big existential themes that influence our life. She used the techniques of screenprinting and drawing on paper and textile. The title of her production is Wear Your Worry, We Are Our Worry.
Six public workshops with kids, families and school groups were also an important part of her residency. The unspoken questions of those activities were: can we talk and listen, share and wear each other's worries? Texts and photos from the workshops will be used as materials for a special ZIN publication of the project.
Residency dates: 1 - 31 December 2022 (17 January 2023 - final event)
Born in Prishtinë, Kosovo, in 1988 Qëndresë Deda graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prishtinë in 2010 and later from the Video & New Media programme at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana. Her works have been shown in several solo and group exhibitions in Pristina (L'Espace Culturel Francais; Tetris - Space for Manipulation; Traffic Gallery, Stacion - Centre for Contemporary Art, Art Gallery of Kosovo). In 2014, she had an exhibition at KC Tobačna 001 in Ljubljana, where she was a residence artist. In 2015, she had an exhibition at Villa Romana, Florence, also a part of artist-in-residence program. In the same year, her works were part of the 31st Biennial of Graphic Arts in Ljubljana. She is a two-time finalist of the Artists of tomorrow Award (Stacion - Centre for Contemporary Art, Pristina). Deda is actively involved in the local independent art scene in Ljubljana and works with the festivals Red Dawns, City of Women and SCCA Ljubljana.
Qënderesë Deda in workshop with school kids. Photo by Urška Boljkovac.
