bang bang

"... a video piece about a woman and her two children, who survived the war. It is part of a series of works titled 'Memory'. While concentrating on an individual, Heta explains, "it's really about all of us who shared her fate. There is no image; there is only her voice and her story."

Author: Diana Yeh, Visiting Arts

The art works by Albert Heta have a common point in emphasizing the non-present, the absence. Heta uses minimalist tools of a totally reduced symbolism, and places his work at the edge of the ambiguity of signs, signs which are “attacked” by oblivion and lackness.

In his last video titled Bang Bang, Heta relies only upon the great imaginative power of a woman’s voice, who tells the story of how she and her two children had survived a tragedy :

„… I was crossing the border, with my daughter, my son... With everyone, my friends, everyone... And we were separated from them at the border. `You´, the Serb police said, `You stop, here. We will now cut your throat´. Oh my God! I raised my hands and started to cry. First they burned my daughter´s face. She started to cry and scream `Mum´. `Silence, silence´, I kept saying to her. She was covered in blood. And my son, they hit him on the stomach! Bang! Breathless as he was, they threw him on the ground. `Oh my God´, I kept saying... He said `Pick up your children´. I started to walk and kept walking on the road holding my children like this. `Don’t look back´, he said. I wouldn´t dare to look back. I just kept walking and walking. I was thinking, they´ll shoot us any time now. Me and my children, they will shoot us all. But God Almighty... thank God Almighty that my children were saved and myself... The Serb police told me: `Go on, don´t look back.´ I was expecting: `Bang! Bang!´ They want to kill me, and both of my children! But it was God´s will. Thank God Almighty, my children were saved, and me with them... Very, very well... Because the war is very bad… “

Shkelzen Maliqi

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