Genc Kadriu

Genc Kadriu (KS/UK) is a contemporary artist who currently lives and works between Prishtina and Tirana. Kadriu’s art is characterized by the collision of the personal interior space with social reality. Using tangible and symbolic aspects from material culture, collective heritage, natural history, literature, spirituality and memorabilia, Kadriu's works are brought about through a kind of poetic museological array of performed objects in the shape of sculptural bundles and spatial installations. Via interdisciplinary investigations and applied experimentation, Kadriu’s practice follows a dialectics of opposites, interdependence and a logic of interaction between chance and intentionality.

Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust or The Twelve Martyrs
Comprises of an outdoor install of 12 mock-up grave stones cut from lignite coal from an open-pit mine in the Kosovo Basin. They are inscribed, each with numerically corresponding name of the Gregorian calendaric month. Displayed as a cemetery at the front of MQ’s gate throughout winter until the second week of March, last frost days when seeds can be planted again. Henceforth they are buried on their standing spots to become organic fertilizer for the underland networks of soil’s symbiotic renewal. A selection of photographs taken at different times of the day throughout the short life of this evanscent piece become archival ‘seeds’ in a form of an artist’s book with acompanying poems and other commentary contribution texts.