August 3, 2025
On August 5, 2025, Dealing with the Past Corner (DwP Corner) opens at the Gallery of the House of Culture in Prizren, as part of Dokufest.
DwP Corner is a space created by the Humanitarian Law Center Kosovo (HLCK) which, through exhibitions, personal stories, research, and reports, offers visitors fragments from Kosovo’s tragic past. Alongside publications and reports on transitional justice, HLCK curates projects for this space, exhibitions or research works that focus on Dealing with the Past, engaging artists and authors from various disciplines.
This year, DwP Corner will present the virtual version and promotion of the catalog of HLCK’s most recent exhibition "One Day" curated by Blerta Hoçia.
Through the testimonies of survivors of that tragic day, the exhibition revives the memories of war and its consequences. No day is ordinary in war, and no day of peace will ever be complete as long as a new war is happening somewhere else. War has the ability to drain and simultaneously annihilate meanings; of language, dignity, humanity, and of time. Following this concept of diminishment, which is the essence of war itself, the exhibition, which is dedicated to all of its survivors, symbolically decides to condense the entire duration of the war by reconstructing and presenting a single day of it. This day, whose autopsy is divided into thousands of fragile moments, contains all kinds of severe human rights violations, where each story told shrinks until it transforms into a fragment, similar to the revived images of a traumatic memory.
Meanwhile, the physical exhibition presented this year is entitled “Dreams Take Place In My Old House” by author Bleona Kurteshi. Her main aim was to place a spotlight on an aspect rarely addressed in Kosovo’s post-war memorialization initiatives: the heritage of war and the absence of its physical traces. Entire houses and villages burned were rebuilt from scratch, leaving behind almost no marks of destruction. In this way, the trace or mark of war reappears in the words of the interviewees, who narrate their stories verbally and through the clay reconstructions of burned houses, created by sculptor Ardit Berisha based on their memory.
This activity, part of Dokufest, is supported by: The Swiss Confederation – Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, and National Endowment for Democracy (NED).
DwP Corner will be open to visitors from 5–9 August 2025.
------
DREAMS TAKE PLACE IN MY OLD HOUSE
Bleona Kurteshi
What are dreams but fragments of memories stored deep within our subconscious? Like surreal, absurd collages, they merge and create new, elusive meanings—ungraspable, often unsettling. All that remains is a feeling of nostalgia, tinged with fear, which occasionally pushes its way to the surface—buried beneath layers of future promises, reconstructions, and hopes for a new life. The ruins of the past transform into a warm bed, the backdrop for new dreams to unfold.
The work presented by Bleona Kurteshi belongs to a certain life of the past. This is not a form of backwardness or living in the past, but rather resembles meditation. It is not so much a look backward as it is a look inward—an introspection.
The research consists of 10 semi-structured interviews where the main aim for the author was to bring to light a largely untouched discussion within Kosovo's post-war memorial initiatives: the legacy of war and the absence of its physical traces, where entire homes and villages burned by Serbian army offensives have been rebuilt from scratch, leaving behind almost no mark. But is this entirely true?
Gradually, as we delve into the lives of the interviewees, we realize that some very small traces have remained everywhere. For the artist herself, one such trace is a stump left like a wedge from the old house, which her grandmother absolutely refused to have torn down. It often obstructs the entrance to the yard, yet it stands there as a living memory, a heritage of what happened. In another story, there is a room from the old house, left alone in the middle of the yard, which neither enhances the yard nor the new house. However, it is the only place where the narrator can sleep comfortably, under the voices of family members and surrounded by old furniture, which he remembers as vividly as they once were.
Unfortunately, in other cases, the only remaining traces are those of memory. Based on this, we decided to collaborate with a young sculptor, Ardit Berisha, who, according to the descriptions, managed to mold from clay those walls of dreams.
As a continuation of her family’s personal stories, the artist focuses on the everyday experiences of individuals affected by war in various ways and shifts attention from a heroic and grand narrative to a more intimate one. In this way, the exhibition becomes a platform where simple stories and experiences are shared.
This artwork is part of the exhibitions organized by the Documentation Center Kosovo, and contributes to dealing with the past through artistic works and creations.
