Common Desire video, sound 10: 59 min., Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, 2024

Directed by Tringa Gashi, co directed by Andita Shabanaj, camera and editing Tringa Gashi and Andita Shabanaj, original music score Aase Nielsen, colorist Eliott Becheau, documentation David Stjernholm

Performers Aida Berisha / Sahar Jamili / Janna Aldaraji / Damai Syarifuddin / Hannah Wagner Höegh / Marie Vedel

Turning the attention to post-war aesthetics and the emerging economy of Kosovo, Common Desire explores what it is that drives people’s pursuit for material status as well as how a population’s desires are materialized within a free market economy. The film is a delirious portrait of the rapidly-changing socio-economic environment of Kosovo, observing several different small businesses and shops in Prizren, and how they generate dreamlike images of prosperity and social-mobility within the “youngest country in Europe”. 

A central location in the work is a ‘bootleg’ perfume shop where scents ‘inspired’ by well known fragrance brands replicate certain visual and material standards. By connecting their scents to branded products, they incorporate the original’s image of affluence and class, as well as its logic and language of desire, gender identity, and fantasy. The perfumes becomes a form of abstraction, a mist of value sprayed onto the self, an image worn by the body. 

(Excerpt from exhibition text by Post Brothers)