Bang Bang, color video, PAL, 2'20'', 2003


Albert Heta's Independence Day

Heta's new projects deal with happiness. He magnifies previously filmed fragments from the TV portraying happy people into large dimensions (3 x 4 m). Heta is after the most culminating, climaxing and delirious flash of happiness. In his project Happiness (2001), he portrays a Kosovar Albanian the moment NATO troops enter Kosovan territory, who, completely raving, throws himself onto the tank of his liberators. The image captures those moments while he is "raging" from excitement.In his other project, Happiness - Independence Day: 1Minute (2001), Heta does not limit himself to finding and detaching the culminating instants, but rather, decides to turn, through his video-clip, into a manufacturer of collective happiness. He employs a clip showing a public address by UN Chief Administrator in Kosova, Mr. Hans Hakkerup, changes the Albanian voiceover translation, inserting instead a new message -- that of official proclamation of Kosova's Independence. This video-project was shown in the Kosovan Public TV (RTK) on 14 June 2001 at 20:30, with the intention of donating two minutes of happiness to the citizens of Kosova, by making their biggest wish and aspiration "come true." Heta, through manipulating emotions and political messages, does not limit himself simply to pamphleteering, and his intentions are not the plain subjecting of political messages, and even less the illustration of them. He is interested in the most focal and the most emotional point of the identity of a person and a community, in which they dissolve and vanish into large ideas and projects. According to Heta, the climaxing instants of ultimate happiness, which he understands as being orgasmic eruptions, have the power of the images of the cores, by giving meanings and explicating the current social trends.

Shkelzen Maliqi