The End of Expressionism
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- The End of Expressionism
- 2000
- color photograph, wallpaper, size variable
Invited by the Council for the Defence of Human Rights and Freedoms to visually organize the dossiers documenting the war crimes committed in Kosovo during 1999, Beqiri was exposed to graphic content showing the burned corpses of civilian victims and their belongings turned into an undifferentiated mass. His work “The End of Expressionism” consists of three photographs, all of which were appropriated by Sokol Beqiri from the war crime dossiers. The compositional order of these found objects exhibits similarities with twentieth-century abstract painting. And by disembedding them from their original context, Beqiri opens up the possibility of a new reading that reaches beyond their facticity. In their being displayed as art objects, the perception around them is organized so that they will be understood as such while the audience’s overall experience, too, is orchestrated to have them respond accordingly. The desire to locate the beautiful evokes dismay, with what one indulges in being not a work of art but the scene of crime. Upon one’s having understood the conditions under which these photographs were produced, the work poses an ethical conundrum—a sense of complicity, since pleasure has been derived instead of experiencing horror at the sight. In Beqiri’s view, “The End of Expressionism” demonstrates various ways of valorizing the liberation of uncontrolled emotion brought about by horrifying violence, thereby bringing about expressionism’s demise. E.K.