Adrian Paci

Adrian Paci was born in Albania in 1969, and lives in Milan. His work is focused on the social reality of his home country. His films balance between autobiographic reports and collective stories. In his narrative videos, Adrian Paci shows how the people’s identity is determined by social and political circumstances. The exhibition is his first solo show in Belgium.

Adrian Paci studied art in Albania before the fall of the totalitarian regime and the subsequent disturbances. In 1997 Adrian Paci fled with his family to Italy, where he has lived and worked since. In his work the artist focus on the dynamics of instability, of being in between and the consequences of social, political and cultural changes on people’s day-to-day lives.

For one of his first works after his emigration, Albanian Stories (1997), Adrian Paci filmed his three-year old daughter Jolanda telling her dolls fairytales that included elements such as their flight and the pillaging. His own background is the base for a broader, collective story. Piktori (2002) questions the artists’ position in society and the notion of art. In this video, we see a painter who has become a forger. He reproduces paintings, falsifies certificates and designs plates for shops. He has transformed into a dealer, compromising his artistic talent to survive. The artist here has become a small criminal who has found a loophole in the law.

Adrian Paci’s exhibition at STUK features four existing works and his latest film Nobody Is romantic anymore, a co-production with STUK. In Happy Birthday from Shkodra TV (2003) he mixes traditional Albanese elements with the contemporary art world. A local Albanese TV-station invites spectators to dedicate videos to their friends’ birthdays. Photographs of the birthday boy or girl are edited in popular video clips. Adrian Paci had clips made as a tribute to some famous artists, including Francis Alys, Anri Sala and Candice Breitz. STUK is also showing three exisiting films: Piktori, I Love the gallerists and they love me (2001) and Believe me I am an artist (2000). In the latter, we see Adrian Paci at a police station being heard on his daughters’ photographs in his works.

Adrian Paci's films have a direct, frontal style; he uses film or cinema as a strategy to tell seemingly truthful stories about reality. He plays with fiction and documentary film. His latest film Nobody is romantic anymore tells the story of an Albanian man in New York working as an artist. Through the painter’s eyes, we see the Western ideal of freedom, and his urge to create. Adrian Paci invites the spectators to an open story in which he shows fragments from the painter’s life. Without putting too much drama into it, he presents portraits of people and artists who try to overcome difficult situations. Adrian Paci’s sharp portraits of today’s society are intimate and at the same time universal. His narrative videos show the fault-lines in people’s daily lives.

Adrian Paci