Shyqyri nimany biography books

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“No, no.” He said, “You will keep both.” So for ten years I held both job positions, I taught there and here I had one third of my salary from the Gallery. And it was not difficult at all to translate them or research and even take information, then also Italian, no problem at all.

And so they came, and you know what they told us? That is why I am surprised that it doesn’t continue now, why do they not invite our diaspora artists, why don’t they create a fund to buy artworks?

So, this is how it began, I think in the best way possible, from the easiest to the most difficult, first small sketches for a newspaper to a book on art history.

Erëmirë Krasniqi: Was it difficult to translate specific terms of the field? I asked for funds in order to buy artworks every year, every artist that had their exhibition in the Gallery were published in a catalogue by me, not by me but by us because it is never nice to say I, but in this case as the director I did it with the Artistic Council.

In fifth grade in Shkolla e Mesme e Artit, I even had a five³ in Serbian, I mean, I knew that language, I started speaking it since I was seven in Prizren, we spoke Albanian, Serbian and even Turkish, we even spoke Turkish, didn’t we?

Then we started learning English and French, and as for the literature in Serbian, Croatian, that was like Albanian to me, I absolutely had no problems because I speak that language very well and I even translated books.

In the years 1979-1989, he was the director of the Art Gallery of Kosovo.

He was also dean of the Faculty of Arts from 1991-1994. Then we would send them to Zagreb, Belgrade, I also had a reciprocal agreement in order to exchange exhibitions, I would take one, they would take one, and not the arrangement of I take one and you take none, I mean we were equals.

And so I slowly started doing them in a very sophisticated way, I didn’t want to do them just for the sake of it, I wanted to do them very very well and equal to the ones that are published in Europe. The specific terms of the field which of course you read in Serbian, was it problem to translate them because I think that somehow it also required some intellectual courage from you to decide what something is going to be called?

Shyqri Nimani: Yes, I am talking about myself but when I talk about myself I don’t think I am a specific case because there were such people everywhere, everywhere you have people like that, someone just had the opportunities.

I mean they really, they were impressed by the book and then I continued, I already have 20 monographs that were done by me, each one took three, four or five years to be done, and this is how I started.

Erëmirë Krasniqi: Can you tell us more about how all the political changes affected the arts scene?

Shyqri Nimani: Now, I mean after the death of the president of Yugoslavia, Josip Broz Tito, no matter whether he was good or bad, he did good things and bad things because when one is in power for a long time, of course they will do good things as well as bad ones.

I came here with six of my friends right after the war and we opened it, we found him here, I did an assessment of the space and looked if everything was here, and everything, everything, everything was here, they hadn’t touched anything. It expanded and became so big that they led 70 percent of the Yugoslav Federate with officers, generals and so on…

I mean it was very developed, why, they were bothered by it?

And so I had started writing and I also would record with Television of Pristina, which had its representatives in Belgrade, we had a TV show once a month, it lasted half an hour and later on it started being broadcasted once a week, so once a week I would take their cameras to record and broadcast on television besides the fact that I also wrote for Rilindja.