Exhibition by Ardian Isufi & Shuk Orani
Curated by Elton Koritari
Valore Italia – MIND Milan
From Monday, May 11 to May 16, 2026
Opening: May 11, 2026 – 12:00 PM
In the heart of Milan’s MIND district, an epicenter of post-industrial transformation and European innovation, Interface constructs a tense and necessary dialogue between art and technology, between memory and simulation, between body and algorithm.The project brings together two international artists of Albanian origin, Ardian Isufi and Shuk Orani, whose practices engage with the major narratives of the present: post-capitalism,
artificial intelligence, and the crisis of authentic experience.
At the center, Isufi’s Metallurgic Disney: an immersive VR video installation that transports the audience into an amusement park built on industrial ruins. A vertiginous journey between memory and spectacle, where productive heritage is transformed into global entertainment. The work reveals, with critical irony, the triumph of capitalism as a promise of escape: a “new promised land” that replaces failed ideologies with an aesthetics of escape and consumption. The ruins of the past are absorbed into the centrifuge of universal entertainment, while power, even as it still declares itself “of the people,” moves irreversibly away from them.
In counterpoint, Orani’s intervention introduces a radically contemporary dimension: two avatars identical to the artist himself, generated by artificial intelligence, dialogue, observe each other, and confront one another until their progressive mutual deterioration. Not tools, but interlocutors. In this ambiguous space, the artist does not resist the machine, but explores its limit: what artificial intelligence cannot do make the right kind of mistakes, get lost, intuit. The collapse of the avatars thus becomes a powerful metaphor for the contemporary
condition, suspended between multiplied identities and the loss of authenticity.
The works of Ardian Isufi arrive at MIND after a significant international exhibition journey: Metallurgic Disney was presented at the Kursaal Santalucia in Bari, at the National Gallery of Kosovo, and at the Contemporary Art Gallery of Tirana. Shuk Orani’s research, on the other hand, has developed across Europe and global contexts, passing through galleries and institutional spaces. Orani’s work comes to Milan following the major solo exhibition at the Contemporary Gallery of Tirana, Albania.
In Milan, these trajectories converge in a moment of synthesis, finding in the context of the technological district an ideal ground to amplify the tensions between past and future. Conceived within the educational context of Valore Italia, the exhibition activates a crucial reflection: what value does restoration hold today of matter, of memory, of experience—in an era dominated by simulation and technological reproducibility?
Curated by Elton Koritari, the exhibition takes shape as a critical device that traverses aesthetics and politics, proposing art not as an answer, but as a space of friction, where the future is not yet determined, but continuously negotiated.
ARTIST / CURATOR
Ardian Isufi is an artist, curator, and professor at the University of Arts in Tirana, where he previously served as Dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts. His practice operates at the intersection of visual art, political memory, and public space, through installations, urban interventions, and curatorial projects that interrogate the legacies of the socialist past and the contradictions of the global present. He has participated in numerous international exhibitions, including the Tirana Biennale and the Albanian Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale, developing a critical language capable of engaging audiences with urgent social and political issues.
Shuk Orani, a multimedia artist based in Hamburg, develops a practice that moves between painting, abstraction, and digital experimentation. His works, exhibited across Europe and beyond, are distinguished by a dynamic interplay of color, gesture, and expressive sensitivity, oscillating between simplicity and complexity. In recent years, his practice has increasingly engaged with emerging technologies, introducing new dimensions of dialogue between artistic identity and artificial systems.
Elton Koritari is a curator, author, and director of cultural projects, widely recognized as one of the most active figures in the contemporary art scene. His practice operates at the intersection of art, education, and social activism through the creation of participatory platforms and international projects. From the Albanian Pavilion at the 2018 Venice Biennale (Zero Space) to initiatives such as Imago Mundi Albania, Parallel 42, Pressura, and Onufri Remade, Koritari has developed a curatorial approach grounded in interdisciplinary dialogue and in the
capacity of art to generate processes of awareness and collective transformation.
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