Ekspozita “Method and praxis: Manifesto Collective + Border Forensics”

Name: Ekspozita %26#8220;Method and praxis: Manifesto Collective + Border Forensics’’
Start: 2025-11-26
End: 2025-12-15
Location: Zeta Contemporary Art Center

METHOD AND PRAXIS:
Manifesto Collective + Border Forensics

Opening 26.11.2025
Zeta Contemporary Art Center
6PM

“Albania is neither a destination nor a transit station but a space perpetually reconfigured to fit shifting geo-political interests—an open-air processing zone where isolation and oblivion are reframed as hospitality.”

METHOD AND PRAXIS is an exhibition that brings together the work of Manifesto Collective and Border Forensics, seeking to shed light on a multilayered process of investigative and creative research. The exhibition is divided into two zones, the first of which is dedicated to specific persons. Border Forensics’ investigation into the police murder of a Black Swiss and South African man, Roger Nzoy Wilhelm, is shown alongside Albanian cases such as the coverup of the death of Ardit Gjoklaj, a minor who was illegally employed in a landfill overseen by the Municipality of Tirana, and the torture of Khalid El-Masri, a German citizen kidnapped by the CIA and subsequently abandoned in Albania. This ongoing fusion of illegality with power and politics has led to the creation of several extraterritorial zones within the country, zones that are further explored in the second zone of the exhibition, dedicated to the Camp. Here, local examples – from the Uyghurs released from Guantanamo Bay and stranded in Albania as stateless persons; to the Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MEK) relocated from Iraq to a tightly controlled compound in Manzë under a US-brokered deal; or the Afghans evacuated after the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, many of whom are still awaiting resettlement; and, last but not least, the Italian extraterritorial migrant detention center in Gjadër – are provocatively juxtaposed with the Border Forensics investigation into the Nador-Melilla border trap massacre, in order to highlight structural similarities but also the necessity for investigative practices to take hold within the Albanian art scene as well. This exhibition represents a first effort to do so.