Anila Rubiku, The Swing of Injustice, 2022 Dimensions: cm. 205 x 276 x 192,8 Powdercoated steel, painted wood and ropes. Installation view Vierzon Biennale ArtChitecture Infinite Liberte’ 2022 , Organized by Frac Centre-Val de Loire di Orleans, France.
Anila Rubiku at Vierzon for the Biennale d’architecture du Fonds Régional d’art contemporain with site specific installation The Swing of Injustice.
September 16, 2022- January 1, 2023
The site-specific installation The Swing of Injustice, conceived by Italian artist of Albanian origins, Anila Rubiku, for the public spaces of the 3th Biennale d’architecture du Fonds Régional d’art Contemporain (Frac Centre-Val de Loire), opens on 16 September in Vierzon, entitled Infinite Freedom: a World for a Feminist Democracy, running until January 1, 2023.
Inspired by the thought of Marie-Cécile Naves, who states claim to a feminist democracy, the Biennale, curated by Marine Bichon, Nabila Metair and Abdelkader Damani, has selected the work of fifty female artists and architects, including Anila Rubiku’s The Swing of Injustice presented by Elisa Fulco and Antonio Leone of Associazione Acrobazie, which won the 10th edition of the Italian Council Grant 2021, dedicated to the promotion of Italian artists in international events.
In line with the theme of the Biennale, The Swing of Injustice, is a reflection on the theme of equality and exclusion perpetrated by a world male entitlement, carried out through the female gaze that reveals how power is, in fact, reproduced in artistic forms and in the construction of public and private spaces.
With the aim of restoring the centrality of female intervention in collective and social places – through participatory practices that actively involve citizens -, Anila Rubiku has created a “usable” work of art for the public space of Vierzon, for people.
The Swing of Injustice is a “functional” work of art, a swing, available to the community, made up of structures of different materials and colors, with seats shaped as birds. These elements function as signifiers of a suffocating system in which the feminine becomes the perfect platform of injustice, with the back and forth coinciding with advances and regressions in democracy and the liberating achievements of feminism.
The pendulum of the swing signifies as well music, rhythm, which can also mark the time of a social change; art in this key is also the possibility of escape, of imagining a different and better future.
Rubiku’s works alongside those of Iwona Buczkowska, Tatiana Bilbao, Renée Gailhoustet, Anna Heringer, Zaha Hadid, Angela Hareiter, Saba Innab, Candice Breitz are also exhibited in the exhibition section titled, “The world built by women” at Frac Centre-Val de Loire di Orleans.
These consist of four separate works created by Rubiku over time, that demonstrate the asymmetries of power that alter the relationship between body and architecture.
The installations Hope is the Thing with Feathers and I talk to the Birds but they don’t listen to me (2022), presented for the first time at FRAC, are composed of 100 drawings on paper, and on fabric dedicated to the representation of birds; Rubiku’s metaphor for freedom and the feminine whose beauty escapes at first sight, whose social and cultural background potentially liberates or frames the potential of women. The artist has contributed as well a cycle of works titled, Forsaken Garden (2021), and the installation made of 51 bunkers Bunker Mentality Landscape Legacy (2012) dedicated to unfinished architecture, time-abandoned gardens, which reveals the social injustice generated by the power that acts on the social body, invalidating it and leaving it unfinished. This is a reflection on how the male prerogative has modeled the urban space and this includes the very idea of femininity and limiting its voice. The artist, on the occasion of the participatory workshop in the educational spaces of the FRAC in Orleans, will create an artist’s book, inspired by the series of birds Hope is the thing with feathers 2022, publisher, Acrobazie edizioni, curated by Elisa Fulco, designed by Mari Conidi.
“Project supported by the Italian Council (10th edition, 2021), program to promote Italian contemporary art in the world by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture”
Anila Rubiku The Swing of Injustice
Biennale d’architecture du Fonds Régional d’art contemporain
Vierzon, September 16, 2022 – January 1, 2023
Vierzon Biennale