Adrian Paci is one of the few internationally known Albanian artists. This is due on the one hand to his participation in numerous biennials and on the other to the fact that his (artist) family immigrated to Italy. His artistic works – videos, painting, installations, photography – deal with living circumstances such as social inequality and migration.
The poetic video Turn on shows close-ups of the faces of unemployed Albanian men, who are regularly found on the steps of the city square of Shkodra, where the artist was born. One after another starts a noisy electrical generator to make a large light bulb glow. As the camera withdraws further and further, the entire staircase becomes visible with all the men hired for the project. What remains invisible is that some of the local residents thought the action was a political protest against the government and assembled, some of them waving flags. The electrical generators that are necessary for survival become a metaphor for the unstable infrastructure of the country since the end of communism, which Lenin had already symbolically equated with electricity.
51st Venice Biennale, 2005

Adrian Paci, born 1969 in Albania, lives and works in Milan