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Gazmend Ejupi, The Ground On Which I Stand, 2015 , acrylic on canvas, 120 x180 cm
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Gazmend Ejupi, The Ground On Which I Stand, 2015 , digital film, monitor, bricks
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Gazmend Ejupi, The Ground On Which I Stand, 2015 , Installation View
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Gazmend Ejupi, Romanian Story, 2013 , single screen video and installation
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Gazmend Ejupi, The Ground On Which I Stand,Installation View, 2010, Tel Aviv
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Gazmend Ejupi, Paintings, Installation View, Tirana Biennale
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Gazmend Ejupi
Selected Work
Biography/Exhibitions
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Gazmend Ejupi is a Kosovar Albanian who lived in Prishtina before leaving wartorn Kosovo for London in the late Nineties . From 2005 Ejupi has shown internationally in Prishtina, Chelouche gallery, Tel Aviv, Clockwork gallery, Berlin and various galleries in Hamburg and Paris. He featured as part of the Tirana Biennale in 2009.
Ejupi's work focuses on conflicted identities and the culture of immigration. He uses film with with direct interview techniques, handheld camera and raw cut footage to achieve a simple yet compelling narrative with his astute social observations
His latest two-person exhibition"The Ground On Which I Stand" with Nir Alon aims to investigate the impossibility of separating art from life and how this contributes to shaping our vision of society. It is curated by Michele Robecchi.
‘The Ground on Which I Stand’ is based on a speech given by the great, late American playwright August Wilson (1945-2005) on the occasion of the Theatre Communications National Conference in New York in 1996. A key part of Wilson’s statement was about the difficulties he was having in separating his concerns with theatre from his concerns of his life as an African-American. 'It is difficult to disassociate one part of my life from another. I have strived to live it all seamless … art and life together, inseparable and indistinguishable. The ideas I discovered and embraced in my youth when my idealism was full blown I have not abandoned in middle age when idealism is something less the blooming, but wisdom is starting to bud. The ideas of self-determination, self-respect and self-defense that governed my life in the ’60s I find just as valid and self-urging in 1996.’
Ejupi worked for a year researching and filming his film ' Romanian Story" following Romanian workers building a stripclub in the UK. The documentary style film frankly exposes the way some Romanian families cope with the task of making a living wage in Britain, intended to support a better life in Romania. With his trademark subtle humour which satirises even the bleakest of situations Ejupi manages to represent the perplexing choices faced by Romanian builders and their spouses in the quest to better themselves at home. The lives of the craftsmen and their loyal wives are starkly contrasted with the aspirational stripclub environment and a haunting of the last communist leader Ceausescu (1918-1989) from the relatively recent Romaian past.
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