Building a Passport Exhibition at COOP Gallery

COOP is pleased to present Building a Passport Exhibition by Fjolla Hoxha. Building a Passport Exhibition invites participants to contribute their own visceral and impromptu responses to enlarged copies of Hoxha’s legal documents before altering them with their own drawings relating to geotechnical investigations, thus disrupting the fixed identity carried by a passport, shifting the focus from legislation to territory. The audience is also welcomed to draw anything else that they wish or that the passport page photocopies evoke. Due to the ‘contemporary’ descriptions and due to being placed in a gallery space, these prints become transformed into artworks which will be displayed in COOP Gallery for the duration of the gallery show.

This performance aims to challenge the whiteness and the sterility of the gallery space by accommodating in it a disciplined body with a displaced sense of belonging and restricted movement, while inviting audience members to contribute their unique responses. Hoxha explores the relation between their officially confirmed existence (by stamps, numbers, and registry) and actual physical, emotional presence (in the gallery). Having lived most of her life in Kosovo/a, a war-torn country in Southeast Europe, Hoxha had to face scrutinous bureaucracy every time she wanted to leave her country. The limitations, isolation and othering reflect on the subtext of country borders and how these disciplining elements can be translated in an environment that doesn’t suffer from similar restrictions but deals with other sentiments such as fear of immigrants or the opposite, championing and advocating pro-immigration. Will this performance process and exhibition evoke gratitude, or will it translate into empathy on a different level? Will it cause awareness and shame of privilege, or will it motivate to actively challenge bordering as a concept in its multiple facets and possibilities of existing? 

Hoxha’s interactive performance will begin at 7pm on Friday, January 3rd, 2025. The opening reception for the collaboratively created artworks will be held from 1pm to 9pm on Saturday, January 4th during the Wedgewood-Houston Art Crawl.