PRESERVING KOSOVO’S MEMORY IN THE ARCTIC WORLD ARCHIVE
On September 15, 2022, the Oral History Initiative deposited one of its collections of video-recorded oral histories: The Oral Histories with Kosovo Visual Artists in the Arctic World Archive, where heritage is preserved in Piql film in the safest location in the world, Svalbard, Norway, to be preserved for the centuries to come.
This is Kosovo’s first deposit in the Arctic World Archive. The deposit includes a collection of ten video-recorded interviews with the first generation of artists and art professionals, who founded the National Gallery of Art and Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Prishtina, along with Albanian and Serbian language transcripts and their English language translations, as well as the bilingual eBook, The National Gallery Oral History Project published in 2018 by the Oral History Initiative in collaboration with the National Gallery of Kosovo.
The collection of first-hand testimonies with Kosovo Visual Artists provides a unique opportunity to trace different genealogies of modernist formations since the 1970s in Kosovo’s art. The artists part of the interview collection are: Lirije Buliqi, Rexhep Ferri, Hysni Krasniqi, Fatmir Krypa, Blerim Luzha, Shyqyri Nimani, Agim Rudi, Tomislav Trifić, Alije Vokshi and Xhevdet Xhafa.
The deposit was supported by the Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sports of the Republic of Kosovo, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Diaspora of the Republic of Kosovo, and the Embassy of the Republic of Kosovo in Norway.