2009 Young European Artist Trieste Contemporanea Award

Every year, the Trieste Contemporanea Committee assigns a promising artist the Young European Artist Trieste Contemporanea Award with the aim of promoting his work and exposing it to the international artistic scene. The winner of the 2009 edition was Driant Zeneli (Shkoder, Albania, 1983). The acknowledgement will give the winner the opportunity of developing a project, which will be exhibited in the Studio Tommaseo of Trieste, and of documenting it by publishing it in a catalog.

Photography and video are the Albanian artist’s favorite media with which he has brought to light, with simple and incisive terms, the delicate boundary between reality and the impalpable utopia hidden behind our daily lives. A long interview with his father, or the simple reconstructing of a puzzle made of identical cards by a group of kids are, in fact, circumstances with which Zeneli has closely examined the troubled history of his country and some of the complex social and political scenarios which have characterized the recent past century; where the relationship between the individual and collective history are in constant friction. In the same way, the random shutting off of a neon sign becomes an opportunity to develop acute reflections regarding the extreme fragility of artistic creation and in the end, the sense of contemporary behavior.

Zeneli will be the protagonist of an exhibition, organized by Daniele Capra, which will open in the Studio Tommaseo in October.

List of previous Young European Artist Trieste Contemporanea Award laureates:

2009 Driant Zeneli (Albania), curator Daniele Capra
2008 Alberto Tadiello (Italy), curator Daniele Capra
2007 Nikola Uzunovski (Macedonia), curator Massimo Premuda
2006 Ivan Moudov (Bulgaria), curator Maria Vassileva
2005 Nika Radic (Croatia), curator Janka Vukmir
2004 not awarded
2003 Nicolae Comanescu (Romania), curator Ruxandra Balaci
2002 Pawel Althamer (Poland), curator Sarah Cosulich Canarutto
2001 Gaetano Mainenti (Italy), curator Giuliana Carbi
2000 Mojca Osojnik (Slovenia), curator Giuliana Carbi
1999 Gia Edzgveradze (Georgia), curator Giuliana Carbi