Dardan Zhegrova

Dardan Zhegrova (1991, RKS) lives and works in Prishtina. His artistic works are object and performance oriented, often based around and influenced by poems. His texts deal with both fictional and experienced events. They are mostly described from the first-person perspective, addressing an (imaginary) counterpart who is sought after by the artist.

There are no gender pronouns such as “her” and “him” – the narrative unfolds between “I” and “You”. Thus, the border between the subject and the viewer of the work starts to blur. This dissolution of the boundaries of a traditional narrative form can also be seen within the structure of time in the poems, which often blur future, present, and past.

In Zhegrova’s work, this breakdown of boundaries also reflects his queer identity, which oscillates between female and male attributes and deliberately rejects and transcends a normative understanding of gender.

The puppets and personae inhabiting Dardan Zhegrova’s works seem soft and porous. They are unabashedly vulnerable and weirdly familiar in their hapless quest for intimacy.

They know what it is to feel unrequited love and aching longing, to grapple with fragile identities in a world not yet comfortable with its queerness. In the video I kissed the kiss on your girlfriend’s cheek, it was still wet, Zhegrova plunges his artistic persona into a dreamscape of desire. Here he dares to express – and indeed to own – his yearning for a man who doesn’t love men.

In Your enthusiasm to tell a story, a series of brightly coloured, human-sized voodoo dolls, the artist looks rather to magic to satisfy his longing. Whereas popular culture versions of voodoo revolve around pins and pain, Zhegrova’s voodoos are all about love. Rather than pins, they have poems inside them and are meant to be cuddled and cared for.