Becoming history without feeling part of it: Driton Selmani’s exhibition in Switzerland

Becoming history without feeling part of it: Driton Selmani’s exhibition in Switzerland

Artist Driton Selmani will have an exhibition open at ‘Albania’ in Zurich, titled “Enough to make history, but never long enough to belong.” Following the exhibition, on October 16, Selmani will join Artan Islamaj for a public talk.

Driton Selmani —Binnenland Sehnsucht, 2025 Carchoal pen on old school paper, found glass bottle Dimensions: 32 x 10 cm Courtesy of the Artist©

exhibition

The exhibition unfolds as a meditation on migration, distance and belonging, through the lens of Albanian seasonal workers (Seasonal) in Switzerland. Reduced to the functional label of “labor force,” their lives became invisible archives of displacement. Max Frisch’s words still ring true: “We sought workers, and people came.”
At the center of the exhibition is the act of giving shape to repressed stories — of reclaiming what was erased. Driton Selmani’s works do not illustrate history, they break it, superimpose it, turn it upside down, until the absence begins to speak.

Ghost flags and imaginary journeys

One part of the exhibition wanders like a ghost: the flag reality check, once proudly erected in Pristina, now hangs in the balance like a twisted message. Between poetry, biting humor, and brutal reality, it evokes a desire for escape — a longing for an imagined “somewhere else.”
Zigzag, a limited edition work, charts an imaginary passage from Pristina to the savior Swiss Alps, as Rodolphe Töpffer once drew them in 1844. Layering eras and places, fiction and fact, Selmani fabricates a passport for precarious states of being. The legal document becomes a theater of political unrest, including a protest in Zurich against the increase in flight prices to Pristina. Here, facts are replaced by the artist’s sharp sarcasm, which turns reality into a playground of fantasies and failures.
As Edward Said reminds us, exile is “the rupture between man and his homeland, between himself and his true home.” Selmani’s works embody this fracture, staging it in objects that are both fragile and challenging.

Driton Selmani — ZigZag No.80 (2019) Charcoal pencil on paper, Dimensions: 40 x 29 cm Courtesy of the Artist ©

Time, borders and false documents

A simple note, framed in an antique style, reflects on the perception of time — how it gains value, here and there, in scarcity and longing. In Switzerland, time is measured, valued, and worshipped; in exile, it is stretched and dissolved.
On the gallery’s facade, Selmani writes a linguistic testimony:

ARBEITSKRÄFTE BESTELLT, ZUKUNFT GELIEFERT
(Workers ordered, futures delivered.)

The phrase encapsulates the demand for work and the sudden arrival of presence, identity, and transformation. What was once reduced to function becomes power itself—multifaceted, embodied, irrevocable.
Another gravitational center appears through the exhibition of fake Swiss passports, which articulate a third perception: not what is thought, nor what exists, but what is only imagined. They speak of utopia and deception, of the thresholds between legality and survival, between fantasy and the state. Here, the notion of Relation of Édouard Glissant becomes tangible — the idea that identities do not exist in isolation, but in permanent negotiation with the Other, formed through obscurity, passage, and exchange.
The exhibition closes with a message in a bottle: Landlocked Deep Desires (2019). Steeped in irony, this work speaks with the voice of the voiceless — those who can only send goods across borders. Summarized in a single phrase, it evokes the impossibility of return, the perpetual postponement of belonging, and the fragile poetics of exile. As Glissant reminds us again, “to wander is to learn connection” — to inhabit the space in between, where the goods themselves become territory.

Driton Selmani — ZigZag No.83 (2019) Charcoal pencil on paper, Dimensions: 29 x 21 cm Courtesy of the Artist ©

Between exile and belonging

the story of Seasonal echoes the state of exile: displaced but essential; absent but present. Etel Adnan wrote: “The world is my exile. I am at home in it because I am never at home.” Her words touch on the invisible lives behind the statistics of migration — the workers who bore the burden of absence to ensure presence elsewhere.
Selmani’s interventions reflect this paradox: works that are at once documentary and poetic, satirical and elegiac, fact and fiction. This solo exhibition by Driton Selmani is a testimony against erasure. It connects geographies and generations, recasting the documents of migration — flags, passports, contracts, archives — into poetic interventions. It challenges the way history is written and who is allowed to belong.
Finally, it is a demand to recognize that what was hidden has always been here, shaping the present.

Text: Alex F. Koenig

Driton Selmani — ZigZag: Passport for Uncertain States (2019) Hardcover | 32 payments 125 × 85 mm, O set, Edition of 100-signed copies by the artist Courtesy of the Artist©

Biography:

Alex F. Koenig (1978) is a curator who lives and works between Glasgow and New Mexico. His practice focuses on the politics of representation, with a particular emphasis on the role of voice and music in contemporary art, as well as decolonial strategies that challenge dominant narratives. Through these approaches, he creates platforms for new forms of identity, memory, and belonging. Koenig’s curatorial work is characterized by a keen awareness of power structures and a commitment to supporting practices that rethink survival, autonomy, and representation beyond imposed categories.

Driton Selmani (1987) is an artist who lives and works between Pristina and Doganaj. His practice dismantles inherited certainties and frames them as unstable images, objects, and gestures. Growing up in a place where he was asked to worship a state that no longer existed, he developed a skepticism towards any given “truth” — a method he now uses to deconstruct political, cultural, and social formations. Stripping flags, documents, and myths of their authority and reconstructing them as fragile artifacts of irony and resistance, Selmani positions himself as both witness and actor, transforming personal stories into sharp reflections on identity, survival, and belonging.

Driton Selmani —Workers were ordered, futures delivered, 2025 Vinyl cut letters on windows, Dimensions variable Courtesy of the Artist©

Following his exhibition, artist Driton Selmani will join Artan Islamaj for a public conversation. Together they will reflect on the (physical) labor of migrants and goods, the weight of documents and flags, the paradoxes of migration and belonging, and the traces that the Albanian diaspora has left in the history of Switzerland — written enough to become history, but never enough to feel a part of.

/Express newspaper