KORA is delighted to present Short Fairy Tales for Adults, a solo exhibition by the artist Driant Zeneli.  Short Fairy Tales for Adults addresses themes of quixotic desire, self-realisation and the contradictory nature of utopias. The exhibition features a series of eleven drawings titled The Snail and the Ostrich (2023), the first of the three-part video installation series The Valley of the Uncanny Lovers, titled The Leaf (2023), and finally The Ostrich and the Ladybug (2023) – a new body of work and the third fairy tale of the Short Fairy Tales for Adults series, created during the artist’s recent residency with Ramdom, here, in Castrignano de’ Greci.

Although Zeneli has chosen diverse visual media to animate each of the three fairy tales featured in the exhibition, the stories mirror each other narratively and stylistically. The protagonists diverse pursuits for self-fulfilment drive the narratives; in The Ostrich and the Ladybug, the Ostrich cannot fly despite having wings and the Ladybug, left feeling different from her peers because she only has six black spots, sets out to find her seventh. Similarly, in The Leaf, Tinny is animated by its desire for platonic companionship and wishes to meet a flower that it has fallen in love with and lives on the ground below it. Inspired by French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and his theory on the intimate interplay between desire and lack, Zeneli toys with the notion of quixotic desire. The characters in Zeneli’s tales are activated in a quest to rectify what they perceive as missing or ‘lacking’ in themselves. Ultimately and somewhat ironically, in The Ostrich and the Ladybug, it is this desire to self-correct that leads the protagonists to their untimely downfall. 

Zeneli’s Short Fairy Tales for Adults have a characteristically dry style and deviate from both the ‘happy-ending’ and intended audience of the fairy tale genre. In The Ostrich and the Ladybug, the story ends abruptly and without catharsis. The protagonists fail to escape their “natural prison,” and are revealed many years later as fossils. This inability for the Ostrich and Ladybug to triumph over adversity presents an aberration to the typically idealistic denouement of fairy tales. Similarly, in The Leaf, when Tinny finally reaches the ground, it realises that what it thought was a flower, was in fact a lithium battery. Through the anti-climatic ending to his stories, Zeneli refuses to present us with a simple resolution or an easily consumable moral to the story. Instead Zeneli situates the reader/spectator in an encounter which he describes as producing a “challenge to our physical and intellectual limits, enacting ironic and dreamlike, and sometimes absurd situations”. These fairytales, infused with wry cynicism, encourage an interrogation into desire, self-realisation and the notion of utopia. 

Zeneli’s artistic process is collaborative; all three of the works featured in the exhibition have been co-authored. The Snail and the Ostrich, co-written with the French Lacanian psychoanalyst and philosopher Leeanne Minter, The Ostrich and the Ladybug co-authored with Mimmo Pesere and The Leaf, a collaboration between Zeneli and the students of the Faculty of Dramaturgy in Belgrade. The Snail and the Ostrich was conceived based on individual conversations between Zeneli and the psychoanalysts of the Jonas Psychoanalytic Clinic Center of Trento. Playing on the reversal of roles between patient and analyst, the artist constructed a “session” with each analyst aimed at creating a different fairy tale with two animals, one chosen by Zeneli and the other by the analyst, as the protagonists of the tale. Zeneli has also collaborated with Roberto and Gabriel, two artisans specialising in papier-mâché to build the sculptures for his new body of work, The Ostrich and the Ladybug. Although Zeneli’s process is dialogical and involves a relinquishing of artistic control, themes such as metamorphosis, utopia, gravity and the relation between the natural and technological world, remain integral to his work. 

Through his series of drawings, video installations and kinetic papier-mâché sculptures, Zeneli brings the fairy tales to life, weaving the fantasy world into our reality. The viewer is immersed into an alternative world, one where reality is infused with dreamlike, absurd and sometimes ironic “elements capable of opening possible alternatives.”