The Shell Cracked

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Bekim Hasaj & Valentina Gelain

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exhibition cycle

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3H+K Gallery ~ 4-26 January 2025 ~ Pori | Rådhusgalleriet ~ 17 January-28 February 2025 ~ Nykarleby.

 

‘The Shell Cracked’ is an exhibition cycle that presents a constantly developing artistic corpus and will see the first exhibition open in January 2025, and evolve until 2026.

The concept of the exhibition was suggested by Bekim Hasaj’s sculptural series ‘Shells’, part of the Scanning Landscape project, and Valentina Gelain’s multidisciplinary project ‘The Peaks’.

‘The Peaks’ investigates psychic instances, the connection between them, and what can be achieved if we actively connect to the unconscious and try to overcome the passive and illusory condition we perpetrate with our ‘conscious’ state. The series of metal sheets entitled ‘shells’ represents the landscape through its textures, traces, and stories. Shaped by hammering the metal on top of a natural body, the ‘shell’ is what remains after a close-up encounter. Both projects approach and interact profoundly with the landscape, the natural environment and its elements.

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Equally important was exploring the forest and encountering legacies of the Ice Age--agglomerates and rock compositions, often etched by cracks and shaping crevices and cavities.

In Gelain’s photographic series ‘a veil of reason over the unconscious’ these rocky entities are covered in snow, with pronounced hollows. Black holes that look like entrances to the underground, portals to the psyche and the unconscious. The snow, on the other hand, represents the veil of consciousness that covers this primordiality.

This was the culminating impulse for conceiving the new body of work focused on sculptural and interactive installations by the artistic duo. Thus, the exhibitions in January 2025 will take the above-mentioned multidisciplinary projects as a starting point and begin to present the new artistic production.

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The topics probed by the exhibition will develop at the pace of the artistic body presented, and are focused on human essence and disposition in connection with the inner apparatus and phenomena, self~collective awareness linked to (re)active investigation and introspection; seeking to stimulate perception and sensitivity through figuration, storytelling and expression with the lead~aid of scenery and natural elements, reminding the viewer of the coexistence and mutuality of which we are a part.

Recalling the story-traces witnessed through the metal in different places and moments by Hasaj, to then be connected and merged into another entity.

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The title preludes a looming change, perhaps one that has already occurred that we are not yet aware of... alteration which cannot be reversed, only embraced.

‘Accidentally shift the precarious ‘balances’ of the self and inner dynamics irremediably uncover are triggered, altering perception-conception of ourselves and others, weaving intersections of awareness that we may come across’.

 

The projects are realized with the support of Svenska Kulturfonden, Svensk-Österbottinska Samfundet, and Arts Promotion Center Finland-Taike. Collaborators for the exhibitions are Elokuvakesku Botnia ry / Filmcentrum Botnia rf, Eyra and Stefan Backas. Thank you to Annika Sillander.​

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Upcoming exhibitions:

Varikko Galleria, Seinäjoki (Finland, October-November 2025); Taidekeskus Itä-Gallery Riutta, Lappeenranta (Finland, November-December 2025).

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Main exhibition archive:

Article  by Elsa Barbieri for Exibart, 12 January 2025

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Curatorial Text:

 

Diving

Moving towards the reflected nothingness, detaching dimly from the distinct surface,

I am deeping, following the thread

Motionless, standing upright, now I see it

 

(What do you see?)

 

I see me

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Diving. This is the first word we encounter in Valentina Gelain's art film The Peaks. The Peaks, the apexes . Something moves, actually not, someone moves. Her eyes gaze at us for a moment, before fleeing. An instant that is fatal: we plunge into the depth of our abyss, at the same speed with which the eye runs towards the highest point of that peak, and towards the deepest point of the rocky complex, where we find the figure – now white, motionless, first black, in motion, now again black, in motion, then again white, motionless.

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Is it Valentina? Yes. Could it be me? Yes. Could it be you? Yes. It becomes clear to us in the moment when the two figures, one pale, the other dark, walking towards each other, meet, touch, and then vanish, allowing the rock to dissolve on a face whose gaze turns toward us through two eyes, whose pupils are a world: after all, we are "beings observed, in the spectacle of the world," as George Christoph Lichtenberg aptly stated. The face, which becomes the body, of Valentina is not merely a face or a body: it rather takes shape as an architecture that we visit and simultaneously look inside, also in relation to the stimuli produced by others who, like us, move within it.

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Gelain thus, with The Peaks, dissects the issue of self-revelation and humanity's relationship, using her own figure as a metaphorical intermediary to stimulate an inquiry into the connection between psychological impulses and what can be achieved if we actively connect with the unconscious, attempting to overcome the passive and illusory condition perpetuated by our conscious state. Her reflection on the blind trust behind which we hide when it comes to looking at ourselves and recognising ourselves continues, outside the film, in the interactive installation The Shell Cracked Protruding, which literally invites (Tell me about the Self, show me your Ego) a confrontation with what remains of the last image of The Peaks, speaking of one's self and showing one's Ego. Such a gaze, one might think, was necessary to shed new light on her figure, to expose both the human and the artist.

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A gaze far from neutral and objective, indeed profoundly engaged and subjective, but precisely for this reason all the more acute and penetrating, which, as it moved in front of The Peaks, will also do so in proximity to Shells, which Bekim Hasaj created within the broader Scanning Landscape project, shaping, hammering metal over a natural body, the rocky body. The sculptural installation survives a gesture, it is what remains of an action, exhibited synecdochically as part of a whole. There is no doubt that Hasaj, like Gelain, manages to clothe their very selves in art, and the art of their selves, which means much more than the ever-present idea of unity between art and existence, understood as a blend of truth and plausibility.

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But be careful, I suggest you reflect on the choice of certain terms: shell, that is, shell, seashell, and clothing. Gelain, in The Peaks, seems, now in white, now in black, clothed. Shells, by Hasaj, seems, beyond the title, to be a true shell, much like the sculpture by Gelain at the heart of the interactive installation, which also seems like a seashell. One of those you come across while walking along the shore of any coastline around the world, often finding several on the sand. The first impulse is to stop and pick them up. Seashells have something special. Due to their simple beauty, their essential form, or perhaps for other mysterious reasons, they attract the gaze of both children and adults. Even their shapes possess a strange allure, evoking the remnants of a time long past.

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Seashells belong to the archaeology of the earth, and they are the mute witnesses to the geology that has unfolded between their appearance and us, much like our skin, don’t you think? Anatomically, the skin appears to be the most extensive and least complex organ, but from a social, psychological, narrative, symbolic, and spiritual perspective, it is one of the most intricate: it envelops the person, incarnates them, distinguishes them, and connects them with others and the world outside, because it is on the skin that life comes to meet us. As such, like a threshold, the skin also refers to our inner self, as if it were sinking and imprinting upon our interior, nurturing it. Several words that Gelain chose in composing the verses, which, along with fabric prints, shape the photographic installation a veil of reason over the unconscious, directly point to this extreme boundary, like skin, where we best reveal who we are: in precarious balance | avoiding protruding to the believed doom | Let yourself drawn, be released of what holds on the surface | Primordial stratum.

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On the surface of the works Gelain and Hasaj have created together, the self has the opportunity to truly expose itself to the light, much like the skin, which the poet Paul Valéry said is the deepest thing there is. This is not a reproduction of something recognisable, nor is it a manifestation, but rather an uncovering of the inner states of the self and exposing them to the relationship with oneself and with us, as if attempting to lift a veil and uncover a dematerialised and undoubtedly more intelligible means to create an ABC of seeing, experiencing, acting, and with this, inevitably, of being human. It is in this sense that the exhibition is destined to evolve, act after act, as if each one constitutes a necessary passage to discover the inner dynamics and possible alterations of perception, both ours and others', until realising that the precarious balance of the self can intersect.

 

Like metal and a rocky body, like skin and the unconscious. Like The Shell Cracked, another (after Dripping Cavities) Pollockian-derived device, open on all sides and always facing towards itself and the viewer, so that everyone, regardless, can cross that shell

 

What terrible loves the thought would evoke, if only it would show a clear sensible image of itself (1).

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Elsa Barbieri

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1. Plato, Phaedrus, 250d, translated into Italian in Complete Works, col. 3, Laterza, Rome-Bari, p. 243

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