The National Gallery of Kosovo | 2026

The world of games of the margins today proposes alternative modes of being online. It is no longer about yet another variation on the heroic journey, centered on a (most often male) protagonist driven by a progressive narrative and violence. Increasingly, we encounter games devoid of a clearly defined goal, suspended between stasis and wandering. Walking simulators, ambient games, queer games grounded in waiting, repetition, and failure. Within these environments, we continually encounter obstacles and dead ends. Games informed by a posthumanist perspective are also gaining popularity—allowing players to embody an animal, the wind, a beam of light, and to traverse virtual worlds from a nonhuman point of view. The phenomenon of inanimate object roleplay goes even further: taking on the role of inanimate entities—tools, everyday objects, elements of the landscape. We can be a stone warming in the sun. A piece of gum stuck to the sole of a shoe. A discarded battery.

These practices are not merely a niche curiosity. They constitute a symptom of deeper shifts within contemporary culture. They resonate with what the authors of On Withdrawal—Scenes of Refusal, Disappearance, and Resilience in Art and Cultural Practices* described as an “aesthetics of withdrawal.” It is understood here as the deliberate limitation of presence, a removal from visibility, silence, or the minimization of expressive means—as both an artistic and a political gesture. It is a strategy of refusal in the face of a culture of excess, of incessant content production, and of the imperative of hypervisibility imposed by digital capitalism.

Object-oriented play also embodies a new sensibility. This perspective resonates with the premises of Object-Oriented Ontology, emerging from speculative realism. Graham Harman**—one of its principal co-creators—advocated a departure from the privileged category of the subject and proposed viewing the world as an egalitarian assemblage of things coexisting on equal terms. Within this framework, a human, an ant, and a pile of stones share a common property: they exist. Each of these entities—regardless of scale or origin—possesses its own mysterious inner life, partially inaccessible to others. Virtual objects, too, are not merely simulations but entities with their own specific mode of existence.

This recalls one of the most widespread practices of being online—lurking: using social media while remaining concealed, refraining from signaling one’s presence or participating in discussions. Withdrawal is only one of the possible strategies of inhabiting the internet. The web constitutes a field of tensions between different techniques of presence and absence. The platform-based internet promotes alternative models of participation that directly align with the logic of the attention economy: influencer culture, oversharing, the incessant curation of one’s own vibe, the multiplication of identities, and adaptation to various formats. As noted by trend analyst Eugene Healey, the ability to disappear completely from the internet is becoming a new status symbol***. Only those who are highly privileged can afford to be unsearchable without incurring economic or professional consequences. Work, career trajectories, and invitations to projects—particularly within the cultural sector—are contingent upon continuous labor within the domain of technofeudal giants****.

We feel an exhaustion with internet identities. Profiles function as indices of real individuals, while simultaneously operating as carefully staged projections. Identity is inscribed into interfaces. It can be edited, archived, abandoned. Fortunately—as the old internet adage goes—on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. This ironic promise of anonymity still flickers on the horizon, though it is increasingly difficult to believe in it. For a long time, the internet appeared as a neutral vessel awaiting expressive content. Interfaces seemed transparent, devoid of ideology—like a modernist white cube. Today, we know that we move within dense infrastructures: algorithms, protocols, and terms of service that, as Shoshana Zuboff***** reminds us, serve the measurable profits of specific social groups—the owners of big tech corporations, increasingly aligned with authoritarian or fascistic regimes—whether through cooperation with ICE in the United States or through advanced systems of surveillance in China. Moreover, digital architectures are designed to modify our behavior, deepen social inequalities, and polarize different groups while obscuring real structures of power. In the face of Big Brother, invisibility may be a strategy worth embracing: to undo, to crumble, to vanish.

In her video-based practice and immersive installations, Laureta Hajrullahu draws on speculation, digital folklore, and the emotional residues of online life. She is interested in identity as an entity in a constant state of editing, compression, translation, and measurement according to algorithmic architectures. Hers is a borderland practice: she grew up at the intersection of Kosovo, Serbia, and North Macedonia, while simultaneously coming of age on the internet. Questions of privacy, gender, and online identity are therefore central to her work, as are the condition of the post-border****** and postdigital futures.

In her latest installation at the National Gallery of Kosovo, Laureta Hajrullahu places at the center of the gallery two oversized objects resembling pixelated stones, across whose surfaces holograms projecting videos appear. For centuries, stones have marked the boundaries of fields and territories. As a durable material, they symbolized the permanence of order and law—once set in place, a stone was meant to guarantee that a border would remain fixed for years. To move it was to violate the law, an act of violence against the established order. Today, we still encounter stone boundary markers, though they are increasingly ignored by migrants who attempt to reach a better world via “informal routes.” At the same time, certain borders are becoming ever more impenetrable—one need only recall the project of “Fortress Europe.”******* These conventional lines find their reflection in digital cartography. The ultimate instance confirming the existence of a state border is often its presence on Google Maps—as if only its inscription into a global interface were capable of granting it reality.

The video projected onto fans, divided into three parts and titled That Which Gave Chase (2026), presents a protagonist trapped in a game as if in a dream from which he cannot awaken. Forced to continuously perform the identity of the hunter, he traverses blurred, desolate landscapes. Although the work evokes a range of contemporary socio-political tensions—from violence in games and online spaces, through models of male socialization, to experiences of political alienation—what mattered most to Laureta was conveying the sense of powerlessness intrinsic to a limbo state: an existence caught in a loop with no exit. The game, conceived as a space of escapism, becomes a trap.

As in many of her previous projects, Laureta Hajrullahu deliberately conflates orders. She combines a sweet, almost candy-like aesthetic with brutal content; internet kitsch, New Aesthetics, and plastic with serious political reflection. By inserting two monumental “boulders” into the gallery space, she operates through absurdity and humor. She transforms immaterial objects familiar from video games—obstacles, textures, elements of landscape—into heavy, physical masses. It is a subversive gesture: what is digital and seemingly intangible becomes a real obstacle within the exhibition space. Background and inanimate object assume the role of protagonists. At the same time, the artist questions the very idea of fixed principles and borders. She reveals their conventionality in the face of a reality that is fluid and entangled, structured less by rigid dividing lines than by membranes and semi-permeable systems.

This mode of thinking returns both in her works on silk and in the installation that subtly intervenes in the gallery window. The graphics evoke the well-known motif of slime from internet culture—a sticky, elastic, formless substance that appears in satisfying reels and relaxing games, hypnotizing viewers with its plasticity. Slime offers no resistance; it yields to touch, dissolves, and continually reshapes itself. In Laureta’s work, however, this aesthetic ceases to be merely a visual pleasure. It becomes an existential figure. It signifies a way of being in a world devoid of distinct identities and easily graspable boundaries—a world structured less by hard contours than by relationality and responsiveness to its surroundings.

Laureta returns to an aesthetic that today appears almost nostalgic: the aesthetics of Y2K and poor images********, expressing the egalitarianism and digital optimism of the early 2000s. She turns toward the internet of our childhood—an internet that promised freedom, a space for subcultures, queer identities, and unrestrained avatars. For her and her peers, the web was a site of escape, of worlding—the construction of alternative worlds in which the boundary between online and IRL remained distinct. One could log in and log out. Today, the vector of escape has often reversed. We seek refuge from doomscrolling, from the flood of AI slop, from the sense of permanent surveillance. The internet is increasingly filled with smoothed, perfectly rendered animations and content mass-produced by models. As Byung-Chul Han has written*********, digital space is becoming ever more populated by specters: bots, algorithms, avatars, and still-imperfect assistants that communicate among themselves—at times almost without our participation (as in Moltbook). For the philosopher, digital communication is spectral and viral, because it possesses the power of contagion. Information or “content,” usually of negligible significance, spreads across the network with the speed of an epidemic or pandemic. Spectrality demands spectators and spectacle; it cannot tolerate silence, it generates noise, it insists on being seen. At the time of writing, it is said that more than half of online content is generated by AI, and that by the end of 2026 this figure may reach as much as 90 percent.

The artist proposes the strategy of “undo” as a gesture of resistance against forces that flatten complexity and transform users into data points or idealized images. She seeks new speculative coalitions within which an alternative intelligence might emerge—alongside a form of solidarity dispersed across bodies, machines, and objects. A withdrawal from the performance of particular identities, and an attempt to look at the world more broadly.

* On Withdrawal—Scenes of Refusal, Disappearance, and Resilience in Art and Cultural Practices, ed. Rebecca Hanna John, Ulrike Jordan, Mutlu Ergün-Hamaz, London 2023. 

** Graham Harman, Object Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything, London 2017. 

*** Eugene Healey, Post-Luxury Status Symbol #1: Connected Privacy

**** Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism. What Killed Capitalism, London 2023. 

***** Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, New York 2018. 

****** It refers to ‘post-border’ theory, that is, a way of thinking about borders as increasingly fluid, virtual, or transforming in the era of post-globalization. V. Konrad, New Directions at the Post-Globalization Border, Journal of Borderlands Studies, 2021, 36 (5), pp. 713–726.

******* I am referring to a term describing the tightening of migration policy, the fortification of the European Union’s external borders, and the intensified control of mobility promoted since around 2024.

******** Hito Steyerl, In defence of the Poor Image, e-flux journal #10, 2009.

********* Byung-Chul Han, From Narration to Information, in: The Crisis of Narration and Other Essays, Cambridge 2024.