On November 2nd, 2024, Harabel Contemporary inaugurated “Beware of the others dream”, an exhibition with the works of Fatlum Doçi in his home town, at the Art Gallery of Shkodra.

The most significant source for Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is Metamorphoses by Roman poet Ovid, an epic poem that waves together many Greek and Roman myths. Shakespeare plays with those myths, feeling free to recreate them, so does Fatlum Doçi when creating, a process which for him is a place of transformation, a relief from rigid order, as is the forest for Shakespeare. Every work is a new unknown creature, ready to come to life, but more likely coming out of a dream than of a nightmare, or just from a planet which doesn’t categorize good or bad. 

Doçi explores the idea of places beyond reality (transformed by enchantment and the supernatural maybe?). As Shakespeare introduces the use of fairies, magic, unexpected and uncontrollable events and desire-induced chaos, Doçi’s work seems to propose that the human relation is a dream, or perhaps a vision; that it is absurd, irrational, a delusion, or, perhaps, on the other hand, a transfiguration. 

Doçi’s artworks are full of symbolism, or, why not, they are entirely stripped of it: because they are simply free. Doçi is even free from himself: in the transposition he makes from drawing to painting to sculpture, it’s as if he splits himself into several parts, each with its own independent creative process, each dreaming on its own, even to the point of rejecting the “other’s” dream. (Beware of dreams, the bear the fear of becoming true.)

Is what you see what you SEE? Doçi will probably say it is not. But does it really matter? 

From the curatorial text of Ajola Xoxa.