Intimacy, did I get it all wrong all along?
Saban Ramadani
4.10.–22.10.2023
"Intimacy, did I get it all wrong all along?" is the coming together of an idea that begun in August 2021.
This exhibition explores intimacy and specifically queerness in it. How to imitate the feeling of mist after an intimate moment with someone. The exhibition features 4 paintings and 3 audio pieces. The paintings have explored different ways of being, feeling, talking, thinking and binding trust and deals. How the person being painted is not a model but rather a person providing the painter a possibility to explore their creativity thus being also the artist in the painting.
How can intimacy be experienced in different ways? This exhibition deals with the artist's own experiences and a way of approaching queer intimacy. Next to the paintings, you can find the audio tracks inspired by different experiences, interconnected to the journey of creative process. The audios have been in the making slowly and obsessively on loop in the course of creating these pieces. Adding little details through process.
The paintings and audio pieces aim to show different emotions in exploring infatuation, heartbreak, love, loneliness, friendship, letting go and intimacy.
The idea started from having the need to paint the imaginary image in my head. The project took a turn when the perception of intimacy changed during the process. The art works deal with sensitivity, physicality and wondering what intimacy is in the end. I still don’t know and I find it to be freeing, how intimacy changes with time and maturity. I have grown to love myself even more and that intimacy wasn’t always there. The more I thought I would understand the more clear it began that I had no clue. The value of close friends, family and queer family have taught me even more about intimacy in the past 2 years.
The works have been part of Saban Ramadani's Aalto University Visual Arts Education thesis project "Queer spaces and intimacy".- forever going and never stopping
Saban Ramadani (b. 1991) is a multidisciplinary artist and performer from Helsinki. They use paint, drawing, animation, performance and sound in their work, creating spaces with sound stimuli with visual works due to the fascination of creating and experiences of overload. Their works are the result of obsessions and hyper-fixations. They also work as an actor and an educator and many more things.
Queer, immigrant, gay, intimacy, loneliness, happiness, forbidden, denied, allowed, been, is, are, seen, heard, refugee, locked, sought, lost, connection, fly, feel, touch, caress, albanian, bosnian, finnish, you, me, them, she, he, emotions, emotionless, trans, bi, asexual, pan, demi, I, you, lesbian, nonbinary, binary, cis, non cis,
Opening performances on the 4th of October: *program
Roivanen 19.00
(Performance)
Angel 19.30
(Performance)
Saban Ramadani 20.00
(Showcase of 13 minute mixtape from the project)