Vangjush Vellahu

Vangjush Vellahu, born in 1987 in Pogradec, Albania, lives and works in Berlin. In 2011 he graduated Bachelor in Fine Arts and 2014 Master in Fine Arts at National University of Arts, Bucharest, Romania and later in 2016 Master in Fine Arts at Muthesius University of Fine Arts and Design in Kiel, Germany.

Vangjush Vellahu was at Hestia Art Residency and Exhibitions Bureau for an art residency that resulted in an exhibition “Fragments I, Where Stories Cut Across The Land” curated by Maja Ćirić.

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