Sislej Xhafa

Galleria Laura Pecci, Milan
Through March 17

Some of the themes Sislej Xhafa examines include multiculturalism, the world of the underground, immigration, and illegal acts. The borders between North and South and between East and West are becoming more porous every day, but the integration of different cultures, through the continual flow of individuals in search of new identities, is slow and difficult. This young artist from Kosovo adopts an entirely apolitical stance in relation to these problems; in fact he uses a light touch and a subtle, pungent irony in showing us, through his personal experiences, the risks of nationalism and the difficulties of social and racial integration.

The curious title of his first Italian solo exhibition is Hooligans in Heaven, taken from a video recently filmed in the Arena in Milan in which three men (Albanians?) run continuously around the track carrying a tree trunk. Xhafa divided up the gallery space by erecting a narrow brick corridor in the center. On this he hung several flags—a recurrent theme in his work.

Like a wall in some shabby city outskirts, albeit not scrawled with graffiti or worn away by time, the central passage of the corridor was transformed by the artist into a sort of open-air urinal, with liquid splashed here and there on the inner walls, forming rivulets that ran down to the floor. While in the past, the artist has focused mainly on themes related to human rights and the paradoxes in so-called multiracial societies, this Milanese exhibit is dominated by sex.

In fact Xhafa literally covered an entire wall of the gallery with dozens of drawings of explicit sexual scenes on colored card, which can be observed by sitting on low, phallic-like structures. Are these, perhaps, some reference to the instances of rape that took place during the recent “ethnic cleansing” wars? No, they are simply images of people having sex.




Daniele Perra
Translation by Jacqueline Smith