Drita Bruqi Kabashi successfully defended her MA Thesis “Critical Fabulation Meets Material Culture: Reimagining Kosova’s Art by Feminist Knowledge Production”
Congratulations to Art History MA Student Drita Bruqi Kabashi, who successfully defended her MA Thesis on July 7, 2023. Her thesis is titled ""Critical Fabulation Meets Material Culture: Reimagining Kosova’s Art by Feminist Knowledge Production". Drita's committee members were Professors Ömür Harmanşah (Thesis Advisor and Chair of Committee), Catherine Becker, and Maru López-Garcia.
Before joining UIC's Art History program, Drita studied drama at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts (BFA), earning the Outstanding Achievement in Studio Award upon graduation. She worked in NYC’s downtown theatres for years before breaking into the Albanian film industry. The film in which she starred, "A Cup of Coffee and New Shoes On", was selected as Albania's official entry for the Best Foreign Film category for the 2023 Academy Awards and has toured film festivals such as Tallinn Black Nights, Goteborg, Bergamo, Vilnius as Official Selection. This film just won two awards at the 23rd Cinedays Festival of European Film: the "Golden Sun" for Best Film in the SEE Competition, and the Critics' Award (by the North Macedonian Film Critics Association).
Drita's thesis research project emerged out of her internship at the National Museum of Kosova in Summer 2022 (supported by UIC's Art History Graduate Student Travel and Research Award), when she assisted the museum in digitizing their collection for Google Cultural Institute.
Here is the abstract for Drita's Thesis:
Critical Fabulation Meets Material Culture: Reimagining Kosova’s Art by Feminist Knowledge Production
Working briefly at the National Museum of Kosova there were artifacts within the permanent collection that stuck to me, haunting me beyond my short internship. I found myself thinking incessantly about these markers of Albanian identity: how have they come to gain their venerated status and who/ what does this status negate? What is this status in service of? I turn to the objects themselves: the Goddess on the Throne (a figurine of the Neolithic), the Xhubleta (customary dress), and oil lamps of Ancient Dardania. I ask them to animate, to respond (or not respond), to engage in a collaboration with me as an art historian and as a female Kosovar American, as Drita. In many ways, these case studies are an attempt to exorcise their haunting through centering the material objects as agents of their own narration, through tracking historical processes that destabilize notions of linear time. Using critical fabulation (specifically the medium of poetry) I am hoping to create an alternative archive for these artifacts. My goal is to propose these poems as alternative museum labels that decenter fixed notions of cultural identity, femininity, and time, and recenter the contradictions that live within the pedestalized status of these cultural icons.
Congratulations Drita!