'The Shell Cracked' 2024-2025

Interactive sculptural-audio installation and namesake exhibition concept

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The exhibition presents Valentina Gelain's new art film 'The Peaks', with side production, and the most recent sculpture series Shell by Bekim Hasaj, part of Scanning Landscape project.

The Peaks investigates psychic instances, the connection between them, and what can be achieve if we actively connect to the unconscious and try to overcome the passive and illusory condition we perpetrate with our 'conscious' state. The series of metal sheets entitled 'shells' represent the landscape through its textures, traces, and stories. Shaped by hammering the metal on top of a natural body, the 'shell' is what remains after a close-up encounter. Both projects approach and interact profoundly with the landscape, the natural environment and its elements.

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The exhibition plan also includes the creation of the interactive installation 'The Shell Cracked', inspired by the rock groups found in nature (Ice Age’s legacy) and from the photographic series 'A veil of reason over the unconscious' by Gelain, which shows these rocky entities covered in snow, with pronounced crevices. Black holes that look like entrances to the underground, portals to the psyche and the unconscious. The snow, on the other hand, represents the veil of consciousness that covers this primordiality.

So, the artists aim to build a revisited rock complex through shaped metals. The installation will also have sound, which will be heard the more you lean towards these symbolic entrances and thus darkness. The subject for the sound is the poem 'The Peaks'.