JAKUP FERRI
JAKUP FERRI
Jakup Ferri is a contemporary artist and professor at the Art Academy of Prishtina and guest advisor at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. He studied at the Art Academy of Prishtina and the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. In 2006, he received the prestigious prize Art Prize of Europe's Future from the Society for Contemporary Art (GfZK) Leipzig. In 2008 he received the Buning Brongers Award in Amsterdam and in 2003 the Muslim Mulliqi Prize and the Artists of Tomorrow Award. 2020 Gjelosh Gjokaj Prize.
He has been artist-in-residence at numerous places, including the International Studio and Curatorial Program New York, Kultur Kontakt Austria. In addition to private collections, his work is also part of the collection of the Ludwig Museum - Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest. Ferris' works have been shown at numerous international exhibitions (solo and group) in museums and galleries, festivals and biennials, including the Venice Biennale, Istanbul Biennale, Prague Biennale, Cetinje Biennale, Manifesta Biennale, Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Art, etc.
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Jakup Ferri zooms in to the details of everyday life, shifting our focus away from “big” topics to create an imaginary world inspired by the immediacy of life, both in intimate and collective spaces. The artworks that emerge in various media from paintings to drawings, paper mosaics, embroideries, carpets and videos are vibrant with detail, with the “small” and the common—the places that life explodes, despite the surrounding capitalist destruction and crisis. Humans, creatures and animals catch sunrays and rain drops, play music, dance, perform acrobatics, rest and regenerate. In between the lines, a different world is imagined.
Ferri’s vivid portrayals of city life and leisure connect to folk elements and rituals where the urban space merges with nature, and where humans and animals act as equals, like in cartoons and comics or indigenous and vernacular imagery. The artist highlights the abundant power of everyday human experience as a survival strategy. His work shows the joyful sides of life, even when circumstances take a turn for the worse (as in post-war societies, transition or migration). The witty and humorous messages conveyed sometimes point to the absurd and other times to surreal aspects of life. Representation (of success and wealth) is rendered irrelevant, as animals watch TV, fantastical creatures partake in community festivities, and, generally, when life is a beach. However, these are not frivolous and playful performances of a privileged artist. They are a clear no – a rejection of the state of things.
Many of Jakup Ferri’s drawings, paintings and embroideries depart from his experiences in life, intimate moments of being a family, creating a safe home, observations of public space, reflections on accessible housing especially in the “West”, working with students, transformations of space due to the pandemic, but also from his fascination and care for animals. Human and human-animal relations are sometimes conceptualized as a network of gazes that offer hints for storytelling in his works. Furthermore, performing arts are a recurring motif. Staging becomes a painterly practice of setting up a scene and its performers within the painting.
(Text by Ivana Marjanović, Catalogue, The Monumentality of the Everyday, La Biennale di Venezia, Kosovo Pavillon)
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Galleries
Harewood Biennal — Create/Elevate
Group exhibition
June 28, 2024 — October 20, 2024
Create/Elevate is the third Harewood Biennial, now established as the major craft Biennial of its kind outside London. Presented within Harewood House and across our gardens and landscapes, it showcases the work of international artists, designers and craft collectives, including new commissions. The exhibition explores the power of craft to surprise, inspire and bring people together and will be accompanied by a dynamic and accessible programme of learning and active public engagement.
The historic and fine art interiors within Harewood House were created by many of the most revered craft-artists and designers in history. Create/Elevate responds to this craft heritage. Its overarching theme explores craft as a tool to connect with and learn from others, across generations and continents. The exhibition offers a playful and multi-sensory experience, featuring ceramics, textiles, jewellery, furniture, and sculptural installations.
As well as the exhibition, we’ll be hosting Make it Harewood, a programme of craft activities and events in partnership with the Crafts Council.
Exhibiting artists and makers: Arabeschi di Latte, BEIT Collective, Botanique Studios, Britto Arts Trust, Rebecca Chesney, Emefa Cole, Common Threads (Alice Kettle), Jakup Ferri, Rosa Harradine, Jan Hendzel, Mani Kambo, Hew Locke, Modular by Mensah, Temitayo Ogunbiyi, Lucia Pizzani. and Xanthe Somers.
The exhibition is curated by Ligaya Salazar and Darren Pih. Ligaya Salazar is an independent curator focused on contemporary interdisciplinary practice at the intersection of design, craft and art. She has previously curated large-scale exhibitions and festivals including for Crafts Council, Wellcome Trust, V&A, Design Museum, and the British Textile Biennial.
Darren Pih is Chief Curator & Artistic Director at Harewood House and brings over 20 years curatorial experience including initiating and delivering major touring exhibitions exploring environmental, sociological and cultural themes at Tate Liverpool.
Create/Elevate is generously supported by Arts Council England, British Council, and the Henry Moore Foundation.
Text by: Harewood Biennal
59th Biennale di Venezia — National Pavillon of Kosovo
Jakup Ferri presents paintings, embroideries and rugs in a monumental exhibition. Ferri's works draw inspiration from childhood drawings, folk art and so-called Outsider Art. The paintings and embroideries stem from the artist's (slightly) surreal drawings depicting scenes of everyday life characterized by animals, children, acrobats and utopian architecture. The hand-woven carpets traversed by geometric patterns, for that matter, are inspired by the avatars drawn by the artist's son in the video game Animal Crossing. Ferri, whose textile works are the result of collaborations with women from Albania, Kosovo, Burkina Faso and Suriname, considers rug-making and embroidery a technique that promotes community cohesion and aggregation.
Manifesta 14 — Prishtina
“Our job is to live in a thick time of caring for and with each other”, writes theorist Donna Haraway. “That’s neither optimistic nor pessimistic, but it involves cultivating the capacity to keep a kind of love and heart with each other”. The caring for and with she has in mind is “multi-species, multi-racial, multi-kinded”.
Working in a post-conflict society, Jakup Ferri follows much the same lines as Haraway in his practice. Influenced by outsider and vernacular art, though predominantly guided by his own intuition and imagination, Ferri draws all manner of creatures conversing, collaborating and co-existing. Plants, animals, humans and hybrids all share the same magical picnic blanket, as it were: they make kin with one another.
The artist’s minutely detailed drawings are the place where he does his thinking. They also serve as the model for his paintings, embroideries and carpets, the latter two being produced together with traditional craftspeople.
Museum of Art Lucerne — We, We or Me
Jakup Ferris' (*1981) visual world is colorful and full of happy creatures. People, animals and hybrid creatures do gymnastics, ride their bicycles or whizz through the pictures on a skateboard. Above all, they come together: outside for a picnic, at the family table, dancing, making music or playing chess in the park. Jakup Ferri seems to ask himself while drawing: What else is in a motif? - And in a flash, the buttons on a shirt become seeds that birds are pecking at. His works sparkle with graphic wit and narrative joy.
The Kosovan artist cultivates a linear style, the outlines are in the foreground and frame the bold colors. Based on drawings, Jakup Ferri creates paintings and has his pictorial inventions woven or embroidered. He draws inspiration from microorganisms, folk art, arts and crafts, art brut and the pixel world of computer games. In his installations, he overlays carpets with abstract-concrete patterns, embroidered drawings and paintings to create a dense cosmos full of stories.
Municipal Gallery Nordhorn — We We
Jakup Ferri (*1981 in Pristina) is one of Kosovo's most internationally renowned artists. In 2022, he represented the pavilion of the Republic of Kosovo at the Venice Biennale. Following his early video works, in which he primarily explored his own situation as an artist in a place largely ignored by the international art world, he has created an extensive body of drawings in recent years. The focus is on fine line drawings, initially on paper, which have been expanded with the help of various other materials, such as painting, collage or textiles, often with bright colors. His pictures mix numerous observations of seemingly familiar subjects with an imagination that always seems to draw from the full. Adults and children, sportsmen, musicians and acrobats, but also animals and objects can be seen. The creatures and things depicted are always seen in a variety of interactions, and the everyday seems to slip into a world of magic or fable by surreal means.
Jakup Ferri also repeatedly incorporates traditional crafts from his homeland, such as embroidery, weaving and carpets. This connection to artistic traditions is also reflected in the motifs, which include numerous abstract patterns as well as representational depictions.
© The artist and Staedtische Galerie Nordhorn, Photo: Helmut Claus
Kunstraum Innsbruck —
Sunray Acrobat
curated by Ivana MarjanovićBy immersing himself in the details of everyday life, Jakup Ferri shifts the focus from the "big" themes to an imaginary world inspired by the immediacy of life in intimate or collective spaces. The artworks of various media, from painting, drawing, paper mosaic, embroidery or carpets to video, pulsate in detail, in the "small" and ordinary, in which life explodes despite all the capitalist destruction and crisis around it. People, creatures and animals collect sunbeams and raindrops, play music, dance, perform acrobatics, rest and regenerate. Between the lines, another world is imagined.
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Ferris lebendiges Porträt des Stadtlebens und seiner Freizeitaktivitäten verbindet sich mit populären Elementen und Ritualen, in denen städtischer Raum und Natur verschmelzen, Menschen und Tiere werden gleichwertige Akteur*innen, wie man das aus Cartoons und Comics kennt oder aus indigener und populärer Vorstellungswelt. Der Künstler betont die enorme Macht des Alltäglichen als Überlebensstrategie. Seine Arbeit befasst sich mit der freudvollen Seite des Lebens, auch wenn die Umstände mitunter schwierig und isolierend sind (wie in den Nachkriegsgesellschaften, Transition und Migration). Die übermittelten Botschaften sind witzig und humorvoll und richten sich oft auf die absurden und surrealen Aspekte des Lebens. Ostentative Repräsentation (von Erfolg und Reichtum) wird irrelevant, schauen doch die Tiere ganz unbeeindruckt fern, besuchen Fantasiefiguren Volksfeste, ist das Leben ein einziger Strand. Dabei handelt es sich keineswegs um eine frivole Performance der Verspieltheit eines privilegierten Künstlers. Es ist ein klares Nein, eine dezidierte Zurückweisung der herrschenden Zustände.
Eine zweidimensionale Ästhetik, reduzierte Zeichen- und Kolorierungstechniken sowie ein paralleles Geschichtenerzählen zeugen von der Leidenschaft des Künstlers für das Populäre, "Volkstümliche" und hausgemachte Kreativität und Kulturproduktion. Kunstgeschichte sowie Off-Kunstgeschichte – von den historischen Avantgarden, Outsider Kunst bis zu Folk Arts und Kunsthandwerk – sind reiche Quellen für die Recherche. Nicht-westlich-zentriertes und nicht-akademisches Wissen ist eine wichtige Referenz, was mit einer Anerkennung für die kreative Kapazität der Menschen einhergeht, unabhängig von ihrem Klassenprivileg (das die zeitgenössische Kunstwelt steuert).
Jakup Ferri gestaltet seine Kunstwerke in intensiver Zusammenarbeit mit Stickereien, Webereien und Teppichknüpfereien in seinem Heimatort Prishtina im Kosovo, in Albanien, Surinam und Burkina Faso. Sein Engagement für diese Medien unterstützt nicht nur kleine Werkstätten, die durch kapitalistische Produktionsweisen sehr gefährdet sind, es unterläuft auch traditionelle Geschlechterrollen (nach der patriarchalen Arbeitsteilung der Geschlechter wird alles Textile den Frauen zugewiesen). Eine Serie von Kunstwerken in Form von Teppichen, die der Künstler in Kooperation mit seinem Sohn Jip gestaltet hat, geht in den Rhythmus der Abstraktion über, inspiriert von digitalen Welten. Die Serie wird neben neuen Arbeiten Ferris gezeigt.
Die Ausstellung im Kunstraum Innsbruck ist die erste Einzelausstellung Jakup Ferris im deutschsprachigen Raum in Europa.
Jakup Ferri (1981, Prishtina, Kosovo, lebt in Prishtina und Den Haag) ist Künstler und Professor an der Kunstakademie Prishtina. Er studierte an der Kunstakademie Prishtina und an der Rijksakademy in Amsterdam. 2003 erhielt er zwei renommierte Kunstpreise in Prishtina: den Muslim Mulliqi Prize sowie den Artists of Tomorrow Award. 2008 bekam er den Buning Brongers Award in Amsterdam. Er erhielt zahlreiche Art Residencies, unter anderem beim International Studio and Curatorial Program New York und Kultur Kontakt Austria. Neben privaten Sammlungen ist seine Arbeit Teil der Kollektion des Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest. Ferri stellt seine Arbeit in zahlreichen internationalen Einzel- und Gruppenaustellungen, in Galerien, auf Festivals und Biennalen aus, darunter: Istanbul Biennial, Taipei Biennial, Cetinje Biennale, Kunsthalle Fridericianum; De Appel Amsterdam; The National Gallery of Kosovo, Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Art, Art Rotterdam, The Center for Historical Reenactments, Johannesburg, South Africa, The Horse Hospital, London, De Hallen Haarlem, KW Institute for Contemporary Art Berlin. http://jakupferri.blogspot.com/
Text: Dr.in Ivana Marjanović
