When I had my solo show – in 2014 at the National Gallery in Pristina – I painted some walls gray in the exhibition space. And at a certain point – hours before the opening – there was a blurry spot on the wall which at first I thought was paint that hadn’t dried or not been well painted, looking closer I realized – weirdly enough – that light reflection had somehow broken through, quite a distance from the left glass entry door, projecting a spot of uncanny rainbow colors of about 5 cm x 10 cm.
I photographed how it looked. Then I mixed these images in two and reproduced them as lenticular prints, so when the viewer moves, the rainbow animates itself, moving too, or disappearing...
I like the idea of bringing an image of the rainbow which once was spotted on a wall somewhere in a south-east European architectural setting, to a public wall, a billboard on a busy thoroughfare.... From east to west, as Austria is considered the first western border to the east... right? So, in this case, the rainbow becomes a kind of traveling ghost.
It's very abstract on many levels and I think it's visually quite obscure as well... but it will definitely work within the concrete frame of the billboards.
I consider billboards to be commercial publicity, consumed mostly through vernacular imagery – however, I would like to do the opposite – certainly something more opaque, a format and aesthetic that perhaps doesn't appear that often in a street in such a manner, but nevertheless as an aesthetic constitutes a common sense within a shared space, a sensibility that can be apprehended by everybody, because ultimately it remains just an abstract rainbow.
Flaka Haliti

Courtesy of the artist and Kunsthaus Bregenz
Photocredit Markus Tretter