In his research-based artistic practice, Driant Zeneli systematically examines the boundary points of reality and fiction, science and mythology, memory and the future. His works emerge from concrete geopolitical situations – abandoned industrial facilities, fragments of science fiction, collective utopias and dystopias – which he reshapes through the medium of film, drawing, text, or video installation. What makes Zeneli’s practice distinctive is not only its formal hybridity, but also its ability to generate spaces of political imagination through the poetics of marginal geographies and “impossible” scientific narratives. His work is not merely a representation of social tensions, but rather their reconfiguration, a translation into spaces of speculation and uncertainty in which the conditions for new thinking can be glimpsed.
Within the multi-year curatorial program Cinematographies of Resistance, conceived by Dina Pokrajac (Subversive Festival) and Leila Topić (MSU), which focuses on artistic practices that destabilize conventional models of knowledge, power, and representation, Zeneli’s exhibition is not positioned merely as an autonomous unit, but as a point within a broader process. His works do not document resistance but invent and recombine it. Relying on a speculative methodology as defined by Marina Vishmidt (Speculation, MIT Press, 2023), Zeneli operates within a space of epistemological contingency: he breaks with the idea of linear progress, a stable subject, and knowledge as accumulation. Instead, film becomes a medium of fragmentation, decay, and resistance to unidirectional history.
Zeneli’s speculation does not arise from fantasies of alternative worlds but from the cracks of reality. These are abandoned industrial facilities, indices of failed modernization projects, or the personal cosmologies of individuals who are not experts but have their own theories about the universe. His protagonists are not actors but co-authors. Instead of “transmitting” stories, Zeneli constructs them together with his protagonists – through long-term relationships and shared processes in which film is not seen as a representational medium but as an open platform for the exchange of imagination, experience, and uncertainty.
In accordance with curatorial approaches that conceive the exhibition as a processual apparatus of knowledge (Exhibitions as Research, Routledge, 2019), this exhibition is not merely a display of a work, but a construction of relations – between image and space, audience and sound, gravity and gaze. The display is conceived as an open system, a spatial-affective configuration in which the film medium extends beyond the screen: into sound vibrations, into the temporality of the installation, into the viewer’s body. In doing so, the exhibition creates conditions for what Denise Ferreira da Silva calls a “poethics of difference without separation” – for the co-existence of heterogeneous times, voices, and cosmic layers that do not seek harmony, but cohabitation.
The work presented, And Then I Found Some Meteorites in My Room (2018), is a three-channel video installation that includes live streaming from the International Space Station (ISS) and a sound performance by DJ Sulejmani. At its center are Bujar and Flora, a father and daughter living near a former metallurgical complex in Elbasan, Albania. Bujar, fascinated by the cosmos, develops personal theories about dark matter and the structure of the solar system, while Flora, under the name DJ Sulejmani, creates her own sonic language beyond the logic of language and nation. Their stories are not eccentric curiosities; they are transmitters of a world in which knowledge is not institutionalized, in which failed models of production have left space for imagination as the only valuable and precious currency.
The work is part of the trilogy Beneath a Surface There’s Just Another Surface (2015–2019), which deals with the relationships between earth and space, failure and utopia, reality and dreams. Each part of the trilogy relies on specific local conditions and on protagonists who are not actors, but co-creators of narrative. In this context, Zeneli’s practice is also radically ethical – it does not speak about others, but with them it produces a space of art as shared thinking, even when that thinking remains unutterable.
Cinematographies of Resistance is a multi-year museum program developed by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb in collaboration with the Subversive Festival. The program presents international filmmakers whose work emerges at the intersection of strategies and practices of contemporary art and film, combining the expressive potential of art film, the film essay, and an openness to experimentation. Cinematographies of Resistance focus on authorial positions that resist mainstream canons, characterized by intermediality and intertextuality of approach, as well as openness to diverse themes. The resistance from the program’s title manifests as the search for new models and ways of thinking, as opposed to the usual frameworks of the film medium, expanded photography, and film and multimedia art. So far, the program has featured the works and video installations of artists Maud Alpi (2018), Sabine Mikelić (2019), Nicole Hewitt (2021), Jasmina Cibic (2023), Nika Autor (2023), and Milica Rakić (2024).
The exhibition will be on display until June 25, 2025.
Driant Zeneli (born 1983 in Shkodra, Albania) is a visual artist whose practice unfolds at the intersection of film, performance, installation, text, and drawing. His works emerge from long-term collaborations with protagonists and communities and are grounded in the exploration of failure, utopia, scientific speculation, and the possibility of alternative imagination within post-industrial landscapes, abandoned ideological projects, and geopolitical transitions. Zeneli’s methodology rejects the idea of the authoritative narrative in favor of processes based on fragmentation, collaboration, and resistance to linear history.
He represented Albania at the 54th Venice Biennale (2011), participated in the 14th Sharjah Biennial (2019), Manifesta 14 in Prishtina (2022), and most recently at the 16th Sharjah Biennial (2025), where he exhibited as part of the thematic section dedicated to speculative visions of technology and the planetary. His work has been shown in institutions such as the Centre Pompidou (Paris), MAXXI (Rome), the Museum of Contemporary Art of Vojvodina, Villa Romana (Florence), the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (Rome), and in numerous other museums, galleries, and festivals internationally. He is the recipient of several fellowships and awards, including from Akademie Schloss Solitude (Stuttgart), KulturKontakt Austria, and the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) in New York.
Zeneli is co-founder of Harabel Contemporary, a platform for contemporary art based in Tirana that actively engages with institutional and urban contexts. His art does not seek to represent reality, but rather to distort, translate, and deconstruct it – in favor of a new shared mode of thinking that emerges from the cracks of the known. He lives and works between Tirana and Turin.
