Manifesto is an art collective and intellectual movement composed of artists, filmmakers, curators, writers, art theorists, historians, architects, and publishers, from various countries, engaged in Albanian contemporary art. In collaboration with the DebatikCenter of Contemporary Art and ZETA Center for Contemporary Art, the Manifesto art collective has developed a series of projects, Manifesto Hijacking (2022), [1] Manifesto Desertion (2023), [2] and Manifesto Great Wave (2024), [3] which offer a deconstruction of the Albanian art scene [4] and the way it is enmeshed with the power of the Albanian oligarchy. [5]
The Christian Democrats is a Christian-democratic political party in Finland.
The Manifesto of Futurism is a manifesto written by the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, published in 1909. In it, Marinetti expresses an artistic philosophy called Futurism, which rejected the past and celebrated speed, machinery, violence, youth, and industry. The manifesto also advocated for the modernization and cultural rejuvenation of Italy.
Sir Isaac Julien is a British installation artist, filmmaker, and Distinguished Professor of the Arts at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Neo-futurism is a late-20th to early-21st-century movement in the arts, design, and architecture.
Colab is the commonly used abbreviation of the New York City artists' group Collaborative Projects, which was formed after a series of open meetings between artists of various disciplines.
Debatik Nazmi Curri is an Albanian professional football coach and former player.
Football Club Prishtina, commonly known as Prishtina, is a professional football club based in Prishtina, Kosovo. The club plays in the Football Superleague of Kosovo. It is the most successful domestic club.
The Great Wave off Kanagawa is a woodblock print by Japanese ukiyo-e artist Hokusai, created in late 1831 during the Edo period of Japanese history. The print depicts three boats moving through a storm-tossed sea, with a large, cresting wave forming a spiral in the centre over the boats and Mount Fuji visible in the background.
Dan Cameron is an American contemporary art curator. He has served as senior curator for Next Wave Visual Art at Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), an annual exhibition of emerging Brooklyn-based artists since 2002. He is also a member of the graduate faculty of School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York, where he teaches the MFA symposium each spring for second-year students. Cameron may or not still be a member of the National Artist Advisory Committee for the Hermitage Artist Retreat in Florida, but does not sit on the board of Trustees for Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Colorado.
Sulejman Pitarka was an Albanian actor, writer, and playwright. His family moved to Durrës, Albania, when he was five. His brother was Bashkim Pitarka, who became an Albanian diplomat.
Accelerationism is a range of revolutionary and reactionary ideas in left-wing and right-wing ideologies that call for the drastic intensification of capitalist growth, technological change, infrastructure sabotage and other processes of social change to destabilize existing systems and create radical social transformations, otherwise referred to as "acceleration". It has been regarded as an ideological spectrum divided into mutually contradictory left-wing and right-wing variants, both of which support the indefinite intensification of capitalism and its structures as well as the conditions for a technological singularity, a hypothetical point in time at which technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible.
Zehra Doğan is a Kurdish artist and journalist and author from Diyarbakır, Turkey. In 2017, she was sentenced to 2 years, 9 months and 22 days in prison for "terrorist propaganda" because of her news coverage, social media posts, and sharing a painting of hers on social media. Her painting depicts the destruction of the Nusaybin, town in southeastern Turkey, after the clashes between state security forces and Kurdish PKK insurgents. After she finished her sentence, she was released from imprisonment from Tarsus Prison on 24 February 2019.
For two years, artists and activists in Tirana, Albania, demonstrated to protect the historic National Theatre building from being demolished.
Armando Lulaj is an artist, playwright, filmmaker, and film producer, living and working in Tirana, Albania. His work “constantly negotiates the borders between economical power, fictional democracy and social disparity in a global context.” Lulaj is the founder of DebatikCenter of Contemporary Art. Lulaj has been called “one of the most prominent Albanian artists of his generation.” Since 2022, Lulaj is a member of the art collective Manifesto.
FAFSWAG is an arts collective of Māori and Pacific LGBTQI+ artists and activists founded in Auckland, New Zealand in 2013. They explore and celebrate the unique identity of gender fluid Pacific people and LGBTQI+ communities in multi-disciplinary art forms. In 2020 FAFSWAG was awarded an Arts Laureate from the New Zealand Arts Foundation, and they also represented New Zealand at the Biennale of Sydney.
The Zeta Center for Contemporary Art, founded in 2007 by Valentina Koça, is an Albanian non-profit exhibition space.
DebatikCenter of Contemporary Art is a contemporary art center and independent film production center based in Tirana, Albania. D.C.C.A defines itself as "nexus of academics, activists, architects, artists, imaginary and real collectives, critics, curators, journalists, translators, etc., that seek to shine a light on these practices but also offer the necessary tools to imagine alternative futures and strategies of resistance to the status quo."
Pleurad Xhafa is an artist, documentary filmmaker, and activist currently based in Tirana. Xhafa develops projects that examine the effects produced by neoliberal political experiments. His research and critical work result from a post-conceptual practice that operates on a documentary basis to subsequently report—visually and politically—on the culture of our time. Xhafa is one of the founders of DebatikCenter of Contemporary Art and is a member of art collective Manifesto.
Jonida Gashi is an Albanian cultural theorist and senior researcher at the Centre for Art Studies at the Academy of Sciences of Albania.