“We The Peoples – 999 Portraits by David Cuka” Ekspozite

David Cuka is an Albanian artist who has chosen the medium of photography to document mainly aspects related to human rights. In the “999 Portraits” project he has focused the camera lens on his subjects, inviting them to be themselves, making no distinction whatsoever, in any respect. David Cuka has widely developed and published his work in local and European media and has held several exhibitions in Albania. Through photography, the artist raises and promotes awareness of social equality and women’s rights, and advocates against the discrimination of the LGBTI+ community in the country and the region — a community to which he himself belongs, as a transgender person.

Representing what makes us unique — this is David Cuka’s research-photographic work. The artist works with the portrait, paying attention to social fractures as much as to emotional states, to characters as much as to belongings, to fragments and details as much as to context. Cuka seeks to intervene incisively in the present, not merely to reproduce or document it, and the entire project unfolds in search of the archetype and the spirit of Humanity, through the diversity and uniqueness of the Being. The photographs of this project are the fruit of long work with the subjects, of an emotional involvement with them and of particular care in their selection. The photographs thus become, for the artist, objects of the relationship between reality and its figuration. And even more, those photographs turn into instruments of mediation in the relationships among people — they activate those relationships.

999 portraits, which fill important urban spaces in Tirana but which could fill any square or public space anywhere in the world, create journeys (experiences) for citizens and stimulate processes of individuation which, according to Jung, in no way excludes but rather includes the world. The Gestaltian refraction of the codes of language and sign, the photographs almost raw, unprocessed — the opposite of the photogenic world of the billions of portraits on social networks — the composition and framing not standardized by those same social networks, the exhibiting in public space where David’s subjects mostly project their lives: all these are premises for leading the visitor to experience far more than merely the sum of the 333 or 999 photographs that make up the exhibition.

The human labyrinth into which visitors enter, which symbolically represents the letters UN (United Nations), is itself an instrument of activation for an inner, spiritual journey, in the individual dimension and at the same time the collective one. This, so as never to forget that the renunciation of belonging to humanity as a whole fuels the mechanisms of hatred. So as never to forget that indifference, or even mere ignorance, can act as a springboard towards intolerance. So as never to forget that silence in the face of human conditions (even extreme ones), silence towards abuses and injustices, silence towards human rights, expresses complicity with that violence or those injustices.

The exhibition “We The Peoples” sublimates the contemporary challenges of the United Nations, beginning with its very title, which celebrates humanity in all its diversity and inspires it towards a more just world. The exhibition aims to present in a figurative way how unity, cooperation and dialogue are the only means to consciously implement a change that translates into a single collective spirit, vividly manifested in the choral and ambitious work of the artist David Cuka.