Vangjush Vellahu

Born in 1987 in Pogradec (Albania), lives and works traveling the world, his base being in Berlin (Germany). Graduated in 2011 in the Department of Fine Arts at the National University of Arts in Bucharest (Romania). In his work Vangjush Vellahu is interested in travel as a medium to collect and tell stories. As a visual artist working with video, prints, objects and archives with the focus on different forms of storytelling particular to specific communities, he explores how collective memories of authoritarian regimes are produced and remembered by communities affected by them. His works intertwine urban histories of entities that from an ideological and political stand point remain on the margins of recognition. His travels often take a shape of journal-like reconfigurations that attempt at re-defining the popular understanding of what borders or territories represent today. His desire to travel comes from an impulse to cross such structures – to link the past with the imagination of possible futures, when where he come from and where he’s heading is very much related to that feeling, the feeling of uncertainty, alienation, but also of home.

Since 2014 he is part of a local group of emerging young artists – Nucleu 0000 – in Bucharest, that tries to coagulate an artistic organization as a response to the lack of cultural finance. Recent group exhibitions include “Hello World. Revising a Collection” at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin (Germany), “Double Wall of Silence” at Škuc gallery in Ljubljana (Slovenia) and “We’re Not Like Them” at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rijeka.

For more info go to Vangjush Vellahu’s website