Vigan Nimani

Vigan Nimani has compiled an expansive archive of photographs. Many of them have been sourced from books, others he took on his travels. For a long time, the artist considered the archive from an aesthetic point of view, using the photographs as a source for his paintings.

These are renowned for their unique depictions of modernist architectures, suspended between figuration and abstraction. The political stories that Nimani’s paintings also inevitably tell used to be of secondary importance to him. Yet the rapid erasure of modernist heritage under turbocapitalism has changed the nature of both the archive and his work.

No longer a mere repository of material, the archive has become a crucial source of cultural memory and resistance: by capturing and conserving the tension, the harmony between the built and vegetal worlds.  

Vigan Nimani is a painter and photographer from Prishtina, Kosovo. He is a collector of books published in Yugoslavia during the 1960s and 1970s. Their portrayal of everyday life, factories, architecture, landscape and nature in the Balkans is a huge source of inspiration for his work. Indeed, most of the scenes in his paintings come from these books, plus catalogues, postcards and his own photography.

Nimani’s use of his own photography as a source material for painting creates a bridge between the observed reality of photography that investigates natural forms and the layers of colour and light in painting. Although his work carries strong references to the past, these visual cues are never explicit.

Nimani removes time references from his source photographs: cropping them, adding filters and manipulating them to enhance details and gestures, thus creating a new image. Through this, Nimani create a timeless feeling in his work.