With Come, but as a Daytime Comet, Flaka Haliti (*1982 in Prishtina) and Jimmie Durham (1940-2021) summon a survey of identity politics and identity markers through subtle, poetic means, exposing and narrowing the scalar difference between manifestation and erasure.
The title evokes a sense of impending arrival, while reflecting on the almost imperceptible moment between the no longer and the not yet. The awareness of such a moment — as rare as the sighting of a comet in daylight — paired with what can both be perceived as invitation and requirement to an indeterminate corporeal or incorporeal entity, hints at the elusive ambiguity, which unites the conceptual frameworks of Haliti and Durham.
Through Flaka Haliti’s works, enigmatic temporal layers and mechanisms veiling and unveiling prompt questions of causality and the conditions of displacement and liminality as identity-creating and socio-political imperatives. She investigates the paradoxicality between the alien and the familiar, subjecthood and objecthood, perception and (re-)presentation, reframing these concepts as mutually interdependent rather than oppositional forces.
Identity is also the organizing force in Jimmie Durham’s cosmos of playful forms. His agile approach to the nature of existence illustrates how he imbued the fundamental essence of things with his unique notion of semantics, reshaping their purpose and policy. In doing so, his works generate a sphere where identity is not a static construct but a fluid, ever-evolving discourse between the self and the other.
The dialogue between Haliti’s and Durham’s works creates a complex exploration of factors inherent in identity and its consequences, simultaneously asking how we might reconcile the irreversible passage of time with the enduring structures of power and resistance. In this way, they engage with identity as something ethereal yet charged with significance, demanding close and continuous attention.
(Text: Teresa Karmencek)
