Within ten years Albanian artist Adrian Paci has managed to enter the star system of the international contemporary art world by participating twice at the Venice Biennale. In 2005 his works were shown in the Museum of Modern Art in New York and later on in Houston, Texas, Stockholm and in a number of Italian galleries. He took part in the Brussels Biennale and in the Tirana Biennale in 2009 with the movie Per Speculum, which was filmed in the green setting of a village in Northamptonshire, England.

Born in Scutari in 1969, Paci studied painting at the Academy of Arts in Tirana. In 1992 he visited Italy for the first time on a scholarship. In 1997 he settled in Milan, where he has lived with his family ever since.

Talking about his inspiration for Per Speculum, Paci recalled some of his earliest reminiscences: “These images do not come from my childhood memory only, but also from the memories of many other children who loved to fool around with the light breaking in the mirrors by using the troubling element produced by the light’s reflection. The initial image was that of a group of children standing under a huge tree – a well known element of the iconography of the Middle Ages as the image of the genealogical tree. One element was missing about which I was reminded when I watched television: a few children from the Gaza Strip who were fighting Israeli soldiers by using the light reflecting from mirrors,” he said about the movie.

In June 2010, Paci exhibited his videos and paintings for the first time in the Kunsthaus Zürich, Switzerland under the name Motion Pictures’ exhibition. They are inspired by Pier Paolo Pasolini and deal with the history of humanity and the consequences of social conflicts and destruction.

Electric Blue is a new video work, especially created for the Kunsthaus exhibition. The works, produced in cooperation with Kunsthaus Graz, were realised in Paci’s hometown, in Scutari. He used the same place to produce the Turn on video which was screened during the Venice Biennale.

In Electric Blue, Paci narrates the story of a man who is trying to earn something just to enable his family to survive at a time when the country was collapsing at the eve of the fall of Communism in 1990. But the 15-minute long video can be considered far more than a historical documentary. It deals with important human themes: with failure and social human destruction; with the wish to escape poverty; with love, sex and passion.

Keeping this in mind, curator Mirjam Varanidis chose to exhibit a new painting entitled Secondo Pasolini (according to Pasolini) in a Swiss museum. In order to realise a work of such a great size, Paci took apart the famous Pier Paolo Pasolini movie Canterbury Tales (1972) frame by frame and then painting them. This positioning through the movie of imagery and frozen frames, between movie and painting characterizes Paci’s work.

The exhibition presents also Paci’s earliest works such as the Albanian Stories (1997) and the Last Gestures (2009) – his video installation in four parts. The departure of the bride from her family is captured in it – a ritual which is rooted in Albanian culture.