Barbara Prenka: What Time Is It Between My Fingers?

The artist Barbara Prenka connects the past, present, and future by using inherited techniques such as drawing and embroidery while simultaneously drawing inspiration from new social practices, as well as the possibilities of a philosophy and physics with new perspectives and questions. The artist even seems to pose the question of whether the present and future might have the power to change the past.
The works on display transport visitors to Kosovo in the 1990s, the year of the artist’s birth, during which the first war on European soil since the Second World War was being fought. Objects from the artist’s family life from that time now adorn the gallery’s works—lace, embroidered doilies, bedspreads, drawings, and elements of the trousseau made by the artist’s mother, which once decorated the bed of her childhood, now embellish the walls of the A plus A Gallery and engage in dialogue with all the works on display.
Part of the constellation of works in the exhibition is the series of 24 drawings titled “Remind me who I am”, which focuses on the methodical repetition of the same image of a bed, each with small variations in colour and structure, as if the depicted object were following a mathematical wave function.
Another project on display is “Dite e re”, a photographic archive of a childhood spent in Kosovo, which has been transformed into intricately embroidered rugs. In the making of these embroideries, the artist involved the women of her family—her mother, grandmother, and aunts—who still live in Kosovo.
“What time is it between my fingers?” suggests a responsible engagement with physics, its technical applications, and the use of its resources. The concept of the exhibition is to allow the installed objects to extend into one another, mirroring the function of the quantum wave.