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The first ever Tirana Biennale was scheduled to open on September 15, 2001. It was to be the first low budget European biennale, and organizers sought to capitalize on Albania’s ability to draw the dark tourism crowd. One of the biennale’s Italian organizers told an interlocutor, “I’m incredibly excited by the idea of a grand exhibition in a completely desolate and anarchic place where the only form of art is survival.”1 Tirana Mayor Edi Rama, a painter himself, had worked with international partners to bring the works of 230 artists to the Albanian capital. These works were to be divided between the National Gallery and a cavernous 4,000-sq meter hangar that China had built for Enver Hoxha in the 1950s. Two weeks before the opening of the biennale, promotional materials were printed; they featured a photo by a Moroccan artist named Hamid Piccardo. The subject of the photo was Osama bin Laden, who was still relatively unknown to the general public when the pamphlets and posters went to print. Piccardo had allegedly been christened the “bearer of jihad in the art world” by bin Laden himself.
Then, four days before the biennale was to open, the twin towers fell. Karlheinz Stockhausen famously described the attacks as “the greatest work of art for the whole cosmos”. With all flights grounded in North America, the first Tirana Biennale was only lightly attended. Even within Europe, there was little appetite to fly. Osama bin Laden, the erstwhile unknown who had served as the face of the biennale, had suddenly become known to the entire world. Who, then, was the artist Hamid Piccardo? Had he really been an affiliate of al-Qaeda and bin Laden, and had he intentionally transmitted a message to the art world? Or had he sent bin Laden’s visage out into the world like a Cassandra, warning of the entire tragedy that was to come? Or was it all just an especially tragicomic coincidence? As it would turn out, the truth was just as strange. Piccardo did not exist.