COD – Center for Openness and Dialogue

The establishment of the Center for Openness and Dialogue (COD), located in the entrance hall of the Prime Minister’s offices on Tirana’s boulevard “Dshmort e Kombit,” marks a significant step forward in the framework of the Government of Albania’s initiative to make public institutions and records open and accessible to citizens – as well as art and research institutions – throughout the country and beyond.

COD provides a unique combination of three venues: a digital room that provides public access to the Prime Minister’s office’s digitalized archive, which contains thousands of documents, including Council of Ministers’ decisions and the institution’s internal correspondence; an internationally registered library that allows COD visitors to interact with thousands of libraries worldwide specializing in politics, current affairs, art, architecture, and urban planning; and an exhibition hall. As such, COD aspires to be a laboratory that studies the precise point at where diverse domains of art, politics, and research collide and their potentials intersect.

COD, established under the auspices of Prime Minister Edi Rama, provides students and researchers, artists and curators, journalists and civil society activists, and the general public with a space where ideas take shape, critical thinking informs art, and culture enlightens politics, a home where they can work together to emancipate the policies that will lead to tomorrow’s progress. COD attempts to demystify an institution that has hitherto been out of reach for people, despite the fact that it has a significant impact on their lives, by taking an open and transparent approach via various kinds of public interaction.

COD aspires to be a platform where universal and individual ideas converge and worldwide and local perspectives may be mapped and connected by bringing together Albanian and international resources, public thinkers, academics, and artists. To that purpose, COD opens its doors with two notable exhibitions: an exhibition of works by globally famous contemporary artists Thomas Demand, Carsten Holler, and Philippe Parreno, and a curatorial project by Zef Paci, professor of Art History and Drawing at Tirana’s Academy of Arts.

As guests approach COD’s entrance, they will see Triple Giant Mushroom, 2015 in the grass path to the right. Triple Giant Mushroom, which depicts a big mushroom consisting of three distinct portions that recall varied geographies, civilizations, and degrees of edible and hazardous, might be seen as a reflection on Albanian politics. Carsten Höller’s art, produced just for COD, is reminiscent of the many types of knowledge that humanity has generated and continues to grow.

When entering COD, visitors pass under Marquee, Tirana, 2015 by Philippe Parreno, a giant artwork that illuminates the building’s entryway. Parreno’s marquees have been placed in a variety of venues across the globe, including New York’s Guggenheim Museum and Park Avenue Armory, Paris’s Palais de Tokyo, and Venice’s Palazzo Grassi. The big marquee attends and welcomes the public at the same time, as though to illuminate and emphasize both a historical structure and a modern place as a threshold where culture and policy, knowledge and critical thinking, outside and interior will collide.

Once entering COD, visitors are confronted with three pieces by Thomas Demand: Tribute, 2011, Attraction, 2013, and Sign, 2015, which are being shown for the first time at COD. Demand’s work depicts a workshop scene in which a sign for the 1939 New York World’s Fair is being created, and it seems to allude to the ongoing and unresolved, disquieting and hopeful issues that this sign – the handshake symbolizes ‘partnership between the people of the world by consumerism’ – once represented.

Marquee Tirana and Giant Triple Mushroom were gratefully gifted to the people of Albania by the artists.

The visitor can enjoy the exhibition curated by Zef Paci in the Digital Room, the first in a series of exhibitions titled Photography Rewrites History, in which guest curators from various fields will explore their subject using the rich collection of documents and artifacts made accessible and available through COD, including manufactured articles drawn from the totalitarian past’s government storages.