Raino Isto | University of Maryland, College Park (original) (raw)

Articles and Refereed Chapters by Raino Isto

Plural and Multiple Geographies of Modern and Contemporary Art in East-Central Europe, 2024

The geography of Central and East European art history has become significantly more nuanced in r... more The geography of Central and East European art history has become significantly more nuanced in recent decades due to the increased attention on the cultural geography of socialist nonalignment, a global history that allows scholars to break away from Cold War binaries. An increasing number of publications focus on art in former Yugoslavia, and its role in the Non-Aligned Movement. There is still, however, relatively little discussion of a different history of nonaligned socialism: that of Stalinist Albania, which pursued a quite distinct path (though one also defined by an artistic emphasis on the legacies of antifascist and anti-imperialist resistance). Albania’s art history has often been set aside from broader histories of nonaligned culture, due to the country’s relative isolationism and to its lack of a recognizable postwar neo-avant-garde. Albania’s socialist art history poses persistent methodological challenges: it appears to rely on the framework of the nation, and it necessitates taking seriously artists who worked and continue to work in figurative, Socialist Realist paradigms. But the history of Cold War Albanian visual art is also a global one (defined, for example, by exchanges with socialist East Asia), and this history points to the centrality of Socialist Realism to many efforts to resist the trajectories of both the capitalist West and the de-Stalinizing Soviet Union. This essay aims to analyze some of what is at stake in including Albania in a truly ‘global’ version of CEE art history, positioning Albania's socialist-era art in relation to both nonalignment and the decolonizing world, looking at relations with China, Vietnam, and Palestine, as well as Albanian responses to racial violence and oppression in the US.

Art Studies/ Studime për Artin, 2024

This article analyzes artistic debates about folk culture and Socialist Realism that took place i... more This article analyzes artistic debates about folk culture and Socialist Realism that took place in state socialist Albania in the 1970s. It begins by exploring the impact that dictator Enver Hoxha’s infamous Fourth Plenum speech had on the visual arts and culture more broadly, and then proceeds to investigate the increasing emphasis on national and folk identity that characterized art critical discourse in Albania after 1973. The article aims to overcome simplistic interpretations of this phenomenon that straightforwardly equate increasing devotion to national themes in the visual arts as part of a decline catalyzed by Albania’s growing isolationism in the 70s decade. Instead, the article shows that the turn to folk themes and practices reflected the extension of certain logics of Albanian Socialist Realist discourse, and parallelled similar developments elsewhere in the world of the late Cold War, with nations in the decolonizing world and established socialist nations alike increasingly focusing on crafts, the applied arts, and the popular forms of making they reflected and developed. The article asks: can we read the prominence of national and folk narratives as part of a complex navigation of Albania’s place in relation to the decolonizing world, as well as the major powers of the Cold War? Can the stronger turn towards folk culture be read as an effort to achieve a kind of totalizing aesthetic account of socialist society, to capitalize on the promise of Albania’s Ideological and Cultural Revolution (begun in the late 1960s) while at the same time profoundly shifting cultural reference points away from Soviet art?

Lumturi Blloshmi: From Scratch, 2024

This essay aims to provide a context for the work of the late artist Lumturi Blloshmi (1944-2020)... more This essay aims to provide a context for the work of the late artist Lumturi Blloshmi (1944-2020), one of the most important artists (and probably the best known woman artist) working in Albania in the postwar period. It accompanies the exhibition "Lumturi Blloshmi: From Scratch", curated by Adela Demetja, which was presented at the Albanian Pavilion of the 2022 Venice Bienale and in 2023 at the National Gallery of Kosova. The essay explores the social, political, and artistic context of socialist-era Albania, and examines the significance of Blloshmi's work in the immediate postsocialist years, including her experimentations with performance and installation, and her participation in the first group of women artists, LindArt.

Art Studies/ Studime për Artin, 2023

This article explores the reactions to and critical discussions surrounding exhibitions in the fi... more This article explores the reactions to and critical discussions surrounding exhibitions in the first few years of the 1970s, primarily focusing on the 1971 National Figurative Arts Exhibition and the Pranvera exhibition of 1972. It looks closely at the responses of artists to the developments taking place –
especially in painting – during Albania’s Ideological and Cultural Revolution, and aims to map out the ideas and aesthetic approaches that both clashed and mutually reinforced each other during these years. It considers the early reception of works by artists such as Edison Gjergo and Edi Hila, analyzes the complexities of debates over pictorial references to historical modernist styles (such as Cubism and Expressionism), and analyzes the significance of
these debates against the background of Albania’s international cultural exchanges at the time. Treating the exhibitions that took place in the early 1970s as a kind of ‘new beginning’ – as contemporary critics in fact saw them – the article explores the direction of culture in state socialist Albania before the more conservative turn of the Fourth Plenum in 1973, arguing for a more diverse and nuanced definition of what artists believed Socialist Realism could accomplish in the Albanian context.

Unfolding Forms: Studies in Honor of Roger P. Hull, 2023

This text appears in "Unfolding Forms: Studies in Honor of Roger P. Hull," edited by Ricardo De M... more This text appears in "Unfolding Forms: Studies in Honor of Roger P. Hull," edited by Ricardo De Mambro Santos and John Olbrantz. The essay is fondly dedicated to Roger Hull, whose thoughtful and inspiring teaching at Willamette University first instilled within me an interest in the importance of local and regional specificities for any compelling global history of art. It was thanks to Roger’s teaching that I first developed an interest in the complexities of art’s relationship to political frameworks, an interest that I can safely say has shaped not only my scholarly pursuits but also my stance as a citizen and socially engaged cultural worker."

Passés Futurs, 2023

This article examines the movement to protect the National Theater in Tirana, Albania, a protest ... more This article examines the movement to protect the National Theater in Tirana, Albania, a protest that lasted for two years—from 2018 to 2020—as various civil society actors attempted to prevent the government from demolishing the building, which was constructed during the Italian fascist occupation of Albania in the end of the 1930s. The movement is a profound example of the ways that civil society actors can come together to expose how contemporary neoliberal politics in postcolonial and postsocialist urban contexts function to mask economic profit and the privatization of space by targeting architectural sites that are connected to undesirable histories.

Art History, 2022

This essay examines the efforts to construct an image of global socialist society in post-war Alb... more This essay examines the efforts to construct an image of global socialist society in post-war Albania, looking closely at the images published in a 1959 travelogue by artist and art critic Andon Kuqali, chronicling his visit to the People's Republic of China. This piece of writing and the accompanying sketches and prints created by the artist reflect the cultural aspects of Albania's efforts to position itself within the socialist world in the period after Stalin's death. In this decade, Albania broke with the Soviet Union and moved towards stronger political and economic alliances with socialist nations in East Asia, including China. Kuqali's travel essay represents a key document in the formation of a global socialist identity in Albania, an effort to find common ground and shared purpose – in both life and modes of artistic production – between peoples who had relatively little knowledge of each other.

RACAR, 2021

After the dissolution of the Socialist Bloc, many public works of commemorative art created under... more After the dissolution of the Socialist Bloc, many public works of commemorative art created under communist regimes were dismantled as an undesirable legacy of totalitarianism, while others have decayed into ruins. Frequently, monuments created in the former Soviet Union are regarded as a heritage comparable to colonialism. In Southeastern Europe, socialist-era monumentality is often more directly connected to localized anti-fascist legacies, given the large number of memorials dedicated to the Partisan resistance movements. Contemporary artists have frequently engaged with the public remnants of socialist monumentality in ways that are critical but also significantly sympathetic. This article examines the practices of Luiza Margan, Nada Prlja, and Armando Lulaj, all of whom have engaged with socialist memorial culture through video, performance, and photography. Drawing on recent discussions of ‘weak theory,’ the article develops a theoretical framework of ‘weak monumentality’ to describe recuperative and restorative artistic practices that engage with socialist monumental heritage.

Umění/Art, 2021

This article responds to Matthew Rampley’s comments on the pragmatics of writing an art history o... more This article responds to Matthew Rampley’s comments on the pragmatics of writing an art history of modernism in Central and Eastern Europe by positing the methodological utility of ‘weak theory’ as a framework for understanding both art history itself and the writing of regional art history in the present day. The article puts forward some aspects of a ‘weakened’ history of modernisms: the notion of modernism as a multiplicity of movements, styles, and ideologies; the phenomenon of translocality; and the importance of affective considerations in writing the history of Central and Eastern European art. It suggests that we embrace the emotional valences of writing a nuanced history of art from the region, rather than attempting to avoid such affective elements, and rather than seeking to explain away any references to belatedness or hierarchical cultural relationships.

ARTMargins, 2021

This article looks closely at the inclusion of Albanian Socialist Realism in one of renowned Swis... more This article looks closely at the inclusion of Albanian Socialist Realism in one of renowned Swiss curator Harald Szeemann’s last exhibitions, Blood & Honey: The Future’s in the Balkans (Essl Museum, Vienna, 2003). In this exhibition, Szeemann installed a group of around 40 busts created during the socialist era in Albania, which he had seen installed at the National Gallery of Arts in Tirana. This installation of sculptures was part of an exhibition entitled Homo Socialisticus, curated by Gëzim Qëndro, and Szeemann deployed it as a generalized foil for “subversive” postsocialist contemporary art included in Blood & Honey. The Homo Socialisticus sculptures occupied a prominent place in the exhibition both spatially and rhetorically, and this article examines how we might read Blood & Honey—and the socialist past in general—through Szeemann’s problematic incorporation of this collection of works in one of the key Balkans-oriented exhibitions staged in the early 2000s. The article argues that understanding how Szeemann misread—and discursively oversimplified—Albanian Socialist Realism can help us see not only the continued provincialization of Albania in the contemporary global art world, but more importantly the fundamental misunderstanding of Socialist Realism as a historical phenomenon and a precursor to contemporary geopolitical cultural configurations.

Studime për Artin/ Art Studies, 2020

A number of scholarly efforts have attempted to delineate the modernist (and postmodernist) attra... more A number of scholarly efforts have attempted to delineate the modernist (and postmodernist) attraction to the archive, as both content and as an (an)aesthetic form. However, there has thus far been little effort to understand the precise relationship of socialist realism to the archive, either as a theme or as a mode of historical understanding. There are good reasons for this: socialist realism’s avowedly synthetic ideology, which generally aimed to distil and purify a coherent image of societal development towards the projected communist future, is most frequently regarded as an illusion, a distortion of history that is revealed (ironically) by the kinds of documentary evidence present in archives. Socialist realism’s difficult relationship to photography (its simultaneous reliance on the documentary image and its need to remove ‘problematic’ historical details, to rewrite the past) also seems to place it at odds with the archive’s ambition towards completeness and objectivity. But there are also important reasons to assume that socialist realism (considered as a particular kind of modernism) indeed functioned archivally. Like the archive, socialist realism’s history is closely intertwined with bureaucracy, and like the 19th-century archive, its ideological apparatus was crucially tied to the investigation of temporality. And furthermore, socialist realism often developed alongside archival projects (such as nationalist efforts to document ‘folk’ culture in the periphery, or to produce exhaustive narratives of antifascist activities). Finally, for post-socialist artists and historians, socialist realist cultural objects have undeniably become an archive, a body of evidence to be mined, reconfigured, and questioned. The present essay poses a cluster of questions about socialist realism and the archive, specifically in the context of socialist-era art in Albania: To what degree was socialist realism an archival art form? If socialist realism functioned as an archive in its own time, what kind of archive was it? How are contemporary interventions that engage socialist realist art to be understood as similar to (or different from) other post-socialist artistic interventions in (other kinds of bureaucratic) archives? Was socialist realism’s view of the archive modernist, postmodernist, or something else entirely?

Getty Research Journal, 2021

This article examines the significance of American sculptor Malvina Hoffman's time spent in the B... more This article examines the significance of American sculptor Malvina Hoffman's time spent in the Balkans as a relief worker after World War One for her later efforts to use sculpture to reify racial categories.

International Labor and Working-Class History, 2020

Across former Eastern Europe, the transition from state socialism toward neoliberal capitalism ha... more Across former Eastern Europe, the transition from state socialism toward neoliberal capitalism has been accompanied by a marked reduction in emphasis on working-class identities. Because of the centrality of class to socialist-era identity-construction projects, the recent and relatively sudden ascendancy of various forms of individualist, consumption-oriented subjectivity in postrevolutionary societies has produced conflicts that are often more visible than in societies where capitalism has been the accepted economic paradigm for much longer. This shift can be seen in the realm of art and visual culture: Images of the worker once dominated public spaces under state socialism, competing in number with representations of leaders and communist ideologues, but since 1989 they have often been vandalized, dismantled, or else relocated to decay in relative obscurity. Where new public images of the worker do appear in postsocialist neoliberal conditions, they frequently serve as nexuses of controversy, where generational and ideological conflicts regarding current labor conditions and the legacy of worker solidarity play out. The debates surrounding representations of workers in postsocialism are both part of a global history of postsocialist art and part of the history of labor and its relation to contemporary urban space. This article examines artistic representations of the worker sited in public space in postsocialist Albania, in order to map the political and artistic discourses that animate engagements with working-class identity in conditions of neoliberal social transformation.

International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity, 2020

This article examines the role that monumentality—and efforts to critique it—have played in shapi... more This article examines the role that monumentality—and efforts to critique it—have played in shaping the experience of public space in post-socialist Albania. It considers artistic and architectural strategies often labeled ‘counter-monumental’ because they were first developed as a way to challenge authoritarian and nationalist monumental
structures from the past, and it argues that in Albania these counter-monumental strategies have become wedded to centralized state power. In the conditions of neoliberal capitalism, projects that aim to undo traditional monumentality can effectively obfuscate political agendas. In Albania, where Edi Rama—the current Prime Minister—is also a practicing artist, the discourses of contemporary art have served to increase the centralization of political authority, and the work of architecture and design firms such as the Brussels-based group 51N4E have reinforced the symbolic power of the state at the same time that they claim to open public spaces up for citizen
participation.

Extrapolation, 2019

This article analyzes the relationship between science fiction paradigms and socialist-era Yugosl... more This article analyzes the relationship between science fiction paradigms and socialist-era Yugoslav monuments through a discussion of two recent independent films, Sankofa and A Second World. In Sankofa, these monuments are documented as part of the creation of a final collective archive before the apocalyptic destruction of human society, while in A Second World the monuments visually narrate the story of an elderly man who claims to be communicating with an alien utopia. The article considers the historical context of these monuments, how they emerged into popular culture, and how their association with science fiction affects our understandings of them.

ReS Futurae: Revue d'études sur la science-fiction, 2021

Les artistes modernes et contemporains qui travaillent sur la monumentalité ont parfois situé leu... more Les artistes modernes et contemporains qui travaillent sur la monumentalité ont parfois situé leurs œuvres dans la science-fiction. Parfois encore, des sculptures monumentales ont été étiquetées comme science-fictionnelles par le public qui voyait ces formes monumentales comme le résultat d’un passage extraterrestre ou d’un déplacement temporel. Alors que l’histoire de l’art s’est parfois intéressée à l’influence des idées science-fictionnelles sur les artistes modernes et contemporains, il n’y a toujours pas d’étude plus approfondie de la relation entre la monumentalité et la science-fiction. Considérer la manière dont les monuments eux-mêmes ont été représentés dans la littérature de science-fiction est une étape nécessaire pour mieux comprendre cette relation. Cet article étudie les représentations et les fonctions des monuments dans un certain nombre d’œuvres de science-fiction, dont La Machine à explorer le temps d’H. G Wells (1895), Les Montagnes hallucinées de H.P Lovecraft (1936), Les Chronolithes de Robert Charles Wilson (2001) et Les Menhirs de glace de Kim Stanley Robinson (1984). La manière dont les monuments apparaissent dans ces textes de science-fiction, et dans d’autres, pose un ensemble de questions sur la perception de l’inévitabilité, la forme du temps et la mutabilité de l’histoire. Ces œuvres explorent la manière dont la relation entre le passé et le futur peut être reconfigurée par le biais de découvertes de formes monumentales, qui jettent de nouveaux ponts et créent de nouvelles chronologies entre des échelles temporelles cosmiques et historiques.

Science Fiction Studies, 2019

Modern and contemporary artists working in relation to monumentality have sometimes positioned th... more Modern and contemporary artists working in relation to monumentality have sometimes
positioned their works in relation to sf, and at other times works of monumental sculpture
have been labeled as science-fictional by audiences to whom these monumental forms
appear alien or displaced in time. While art history has sometimes examined the influence
of sf ideas on modern and contemporary artists, a more sustained consideration of the
relationship between monumentality and sf is lacking. One necessary step in advancing
this understanding is a consideration of how monuments themselves have been
represented in sf literature. This article examines the representations and roles of
monuments in a number of sf works, including H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895),
H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness (1936), Robert Charles Wilson’s The
Chronoliths (2001), and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Icehenge (1984). The ways in which
monuments appear in these and other sf texts foreground a set of questions about the
perception of inevitability, the shape of time, and the mutability of history. These works
explore how the relationship between past and future can be reconfigured through
encounters with monumental forms that create new bridges and chronologies across
cosmic and historical scales of time.

Open Philosophy, 2019

This article considers the potential intersections of object-oriented ontology and science fictio... more This article considers the potential intersections of object-oriented ontology and science fiction studies by focusing on a particular type of science-fictional artifact, the category of 'Big Dumb Objects.' Big Dumb Objects is a terminology used-often quite playfully-to describe things or structures that are simultaneously massive in size and enigmatic in purpose: they stretch the imagination through both the technical aspects of their construction and the obscurity of their purpose. First used to designate the subjects of several science fiction novels written in the 1970s, Big Dumb Objects (often called BDOs) have been understood in terms of science fiction's enduring interest in the technological sublime and the transcendental. While object-oriented ontology has often turned to science fiction and weird fiction for inspiration in rethinking the possibilities inherent in things and their relations, it has not considered the implications of BDOs for a theory of the object more broadly. The goal of this article is to consider how extreme size and representations of scale in science fiction can help expand an understanding of the object along lines that are similar to those pursued by object-oriented ontology, especially Timothy Morton's notion of hyperobjects.

Third Text, 2018

In 1969, Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha wrote an open letter addressed to Kristaq Rama, Shaban Had... more In 1969, Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha wrote an open letter addressed to Kristaq Rama, Shaban Hadëri, and Muntaz Dhrami – the most prominent sculptors in socialist Albania – that contained a series of conceptual and aesthetic considerations bearing upon the creation of the massive Vlora Independence Monument then being realised by the sculptors. The three sculptors likewise responded with an open letter, and this exchange subsequently became one of the key documents of socialist Albanian cultural history. This article considers the way these letters functioned to shape the narrative of art’s relationship to political power and the narration of history in Albania. It explores the kinds of agency attributed to the dictator, to state sculptors, and to the monumental work of art, and considers how the discourse surrounding the exchange served to conceptualise the process of creating public sculpture under socialism as a reflection of the inherently collaborative nature of socialist contemporaneity.

EESTI KUNSTIMUUSEUMI TOIMETISED, 2016

Plural and Multiple Geographies of Modern and Contemporary Art in East-Central Europe, 2024

Art Studies/ Studime për Artin, 2024

Lumturi Blloshmi: From Scratch, 2024

Art Studies/ Studime për Artin, 2023

Unfolding Forms: Studies in Honor of Roger P. Hull, 2023

Passés Futurs, 2023

Art History, 2022

RACAR, 2021

Umění/Art, 2021

ARTMargins, 2021

Studime për Artin/ Art Studies, 2020

Getty Research Journal, 2021

International Labor and Working-Class History, 2020

International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity, 2020

Extrapolation, 2019

ReS Futurae: Revue d'études sur la science-fiction, 2021

Science Fiction Studies, 2019

Open Philosophy, 2019

Third Text, 2018

EESTI KUNSTIMUUSEUMI TOIMETISED, 2016

MAD Magazine, 2023

This essay explores the politics of the topiary along the Lana River, an artificial river that ru... more This essay explores the politics of the topiary along the Lana River, an artificial river that runs through the center of Albania's capital city, Tirana. Long the subject of debates and efforts to modernize the city's public space, this essay looks at the stakes of the artificial forms along the river, and the way they reflect political efforts to reshape Albania.

Linking Art Worlds, 2023

Art historian Raino Isto interviews La Société Spectrale (Armando Lulaj, Jonida Gashi, Pleurad Xh... more Art historian Raino Isto interviews La Société Spectrale (Armando Lulaj, Jonida Gashi, Pleurad Xhafa), a collective comprising members of the DebatikCenter of Contemporary Art (DCCA), about the project Moving Billboard. The second iteration of Moving Billboard was agitated (as La Société Spectrale characterizes it) as part of Manifesto DESERTION, an intervention organized by DCCA in collaboration with ZETA Contemporary Art Center in Tirana, Albania, from July 4 to September 11, 2023. This is an interview published in two parts on the Linking Art Worlds website in November 2023, here: https://www.linkingartworlds.org/activating-the-power-to-desert-history-itself-raino-isto-and-la-societe-spectrale-discuss-moving-billboard-part-1/. The second half of the interview (included in the PDF) is here: https://www.linkingartworlds.org/activating-the-power-to-desert-history-itself-raino-isto-and-la-societe-spectrale-discuss-moving-billboard-part-2/

ARTMargins Online, 2023

This is a book review of Ermir Hoxha's survey (in Albanian) on the history of Albanian photography.

Art Studies/ Studime për Artin, 2021

Where did Socialist Realism come from, and what was it, really? Was it a style, a movement, or so... more Where did Socialist Realism come from, and what was it, really? Was it a style, a movement, or something else entirely—a “method”, as its proponents so often characterized it? How did it relate to modernism, that similarly ambiguous phenomenon that dominated so much of cultural discourse—in the West, and beyond—during the 20th century? Arian Leka’s book Realizëm Socialist në Shqipëri attempts to offer answers to these questions, focusing specifically on Socialist Realism in the Albanian context, and looking primarily at poetry and literary criticism (although the book does examine visual culture as well, in its concluding chapter).

Segno, 2022

Nelle filosofie belliche, manovra e logoramento costituiscono le due principali modalità d’intera... more Nelle filosofie belliche, manovra e logoramento costituiscono le due principali modalità d’interazione tra forze avversarie. Come descritto da Stephen E. Hughes, “la manovra è il movimento di una data forza rispetto a una forza avversaria. Il logoramento indica la riduzione di una forza a seguito di una perdita di uomini e armamenti”. Il titolo della mostra di Armando Lulaj, No Room for Manoeuvre (3), presso la galleria ARTRA di Milano, non fa espresso riferimento al contesto militare. Tuttavia, alla luce dello sguardo
investigativo di Lulaj, che in parte si manifesta nella mostra, e che da lungo tempo scruta l’impatto provocato dalle politiche estere, dagli interessi finanziari e dalle azioni militari degli USA sull’Albania, il suo paese natale, quello bellico diventa un quadro imprescindibile. In assenza di sufficiente “spazio di manovra”, la mostra di Lulaj diventa un sito di logoramento: intrappolato in una matrice di interessi politici ed economici neocoloniali che permeano tutti i livelli del mondo dell’arte, l’artista si cimenta in una serie di atti di sparizione che, tra le altre cose, iniziano a delineare un disegno distruttivo.

RomaMoMA Blog, 2022

At documenta fifteen, five massive swallow’s nests have appeared on the façade of the Friderician... more At documenta fifteen, five massive swallow’s nests have appeared on the façade of the Fridericianum. Emerging from its walls between the engaged columns of its southeastern wing, the rough surfaces and organic forms of the five polymer structures that comprise Sead Kazanxhiu’s The Nest at once challenge and compliment the Fridericianum’s neoclassical monumentality. These nests suggest a transformation in the museum’s structure, an interpolation of new and unorthodox spaces that promise a more inclusive vision of the cultural institution, one that can be occupied by historically and politically marginalised cultures. These new elements reference the architectures of the nonhuman world, transforming the institution into a hybrid space that symbolically includes the natural as well as the cultural within its purview. At the same time, the marked aesthetic contrast with the façade asserts the need to acknowledge and preserve positions of cultural difference, to avoid the myth that assimilation can solve problems of inequity and historical injustice.

An Archive in the Attic: On Reconfiguring Art Historical Discourses, 2022

This roundtable was convened as part of the publication associated with the exhibition INFORMATOR... more This roundtable was convened as part of the publication associated with the exhibition INFORMATOR, curated by Hana Halilaj at CCS Bard, 2022.

CAA Reviews, 2022

It has now been some time since historians and critics began to seriously attempt a definition of... more It has now been some time since historians and critics began to seriously attempt a definition of contemporary art understood not simply as the art produced today but as a historical phenomenon. Beginning in the second half of the 2000s, scholars including Terry Smith, Amelia Jones, Peter Osborne, and Richard Meyer offered analyses of this phenomenon, exploring its relationship to modernism, its philosophical underpinnings, and its aesthetic characteristics—insofar as aesthetic considerations can still be considered to play a role in its definition. Octavian Esanu’s The Postsocialist Contemporary serves as both a deepening of these previous efforts and a methodological and historical alternative to them, situating the genesis of contemporary art in a context that is at once global and geographically specific. As its title suggests, Esanu’s book charts the shape of contemporary art by paying close attention to both its institutional framework and its manifestations in the first decade following the end of state socialism in the various nations comprising the former Eastern bloc, the chronological period during which the term “postsocialist” can be most appropriately applied to the region in question. "The Postsocialist Contemporary" argues that the Soros Centers for Contemporary Art (SCCAs), a network of art offices that ultimately numbered twenty by the time the program began to wane in the late 1990s, were the primary agent for the introduction of the notion of “contemporary art” in this region.

ARTMargins Online, 2021

This interview focuses on the film Otranto (2019–2020), created by the artist collective Latent C... more This interview focuses on the film Otranto (2019–2020), created by the artist collective Latent Community (Ionian Bisai and Sotiris Tsiganos). Otranto explores a relatively unknown tragedy: the story of the refugee ship Katër i Radës. The ship departed from the Albanian port city of Vlora, carrying 120 people fleeing the violence that had engulfed the country following the massive collapse of pyramid schemes in 1997. On March 28, 1997, the Italian navy warship Sibilla—acting in accordance with an Italian blockade of Albania to prevent refugees from entering the country—intercepted, rammed, and sunk the Katër i Radës in the strait of Otranto, killing 81 of the refugees aboard. Among the victims were many women and children, some not even a year old. Otranto follows a group of Albanians who lost family members in the tragic event, as they journey to Italy to take part in court proceedings (which have dragged on through various trials over the interim decades, without resulting in justice that the families can accept). The film itself serves as one kind of monument to this loss of life, and its narrative revolves around another monument: the wreck of the Katër i Radës, which the Italian government had transformed into a monument in 2012, and which now stands in the town of Otranto, despite the demands of the families that it be returned to Vlora.

ARTMargins Online, 2020

This article presents part of the history of the Union of Writers and Artists—the official organ ... more This article presents part of the history of the Union of Writers and Artists—the official organ devoted to literature and the fine arts in the People’s Socialist Republic of Albania—and examines (in an incomplete way, of course) the contours of art criticism produced in accordance with official doctrine in Albania, especially in the 1970s decade. Like much Socialist Realist criticism, the output of the Union of Writers and Artists was frequently formulaic, but it also offered a field for artists working beyond the visual (and the union’s critics were almost invariably also practicing artists) to navigate Albanian art’s place vis-à-vis the rest of the socialist world. I argue that this critical project can best be understood in terms of its inability to establish a stable framework in which artistic criticism should operate, or indeed to determine the stable object of aesthetic criticism itself. There are many reasons for this: some were philosophical, and relate to the ongoing ontological challenges faced by postwar realism, while others were essentially political, and derived both from Albania’s shifting international alliances and the vicissitudes of life under a Stalinist dictatorship.

ARTMargins Online, 2020

The “One on One” series presents timely encounters between ARTMargins Online editors and contempo... more The “One on One” series presents timely encounters between ARTMargins Online editors and contemporary artists, usually focused on one recent work. Recently, artist Pleurad Xhafa was among the protesters occupying the National Theater in Tirana in May of this year. Along with the other occupiers, Xhafa was arrested by police, and although he was subsequently released, he is currently facing charges including resisting arrest and illegal gathering.

La Belle Revue, 2020

This is a short article focused on recent examples of contemporary artists engaging with (counter... more This is a short article focused on recent examples of contemporary artists engaging with (counter-)heritage in Tirana, Albania.

ARTMargins Online, 2020

This is a review of the volume Notes on Contemporary Art in Kosovo, edited by Katharina Schendl ... more This is a review of the volume Notes on Contemporary Art in Kosovo, edited by Katharina Schendl (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2018).

DebatikCenter of Contemporary Art: Texts Series, 2019

Page 2 of 22 https://debatikcenter.net/texts/rebirth\_and\_absence photograph's charm: although it ... more Page 2 of 22 https://debatikcenter.net/texts/rebirth_and_absence photograph's charm: although it is clearly structured by both architecture and ideology, these actors are absent, in an explicit sense, from its field of vision. The selectiveness of the camera's gaze is palpable.

ARTET PUBLIKE TIRANË– POLITIKA DHE PLAN VEPRIMI (2019-2024), 2019

ARTET PUBLIKE TIRANË– POLITIKA DHE PLAN VEPRIMI (2019-2024) Rekomandime për Partneritet Civil- P... more ARTET PUBLIKE TIRANË– POLITIKA DHE PLAN VEPRIMI (2019-2024)

Rekomandime për Partneritet Civil- Publik- Privat

Në 24 Qershor , 2019 tek Monumenti i Miqësisë në Tirane u zhvillua takimi nga Ekphrasis Studio, OJF në menaxhimin e arteve dhe kulturës, e cila dorëzoi përfaqësuesve të Bashkisë Tiranë dhe Ministrisë së Kulturës, rekomandimet për një Politikë dhe Plan Veprimi (2019-2024) për artet në hapësirat publike në Tiranë, sipas metodologjisë nga poshtë lart.

Rekomandimet për këto dokumenta strategjik janë bazuar në aktivitete të ndryshme të Projektit HARP.al– Hapësira ARteve Publike, përgjatë 16 muajve në Tiranë, përfshirë hartën dixhitale për artet publike në Tirane, kërkime, publikim “Shprehjet Artistike të së Shkuarës dhe Tashmes”, punishte, takime me artistë, konferencë ndërkombëtare, raporte mbi 770 pyetësorë nga biznese, ojf, qytetarë, artistë, etj.

Rekomandimet për një Politikë dhe Plan Veprimi 5 vjeçar për artet në hapësirat publike në Tiranë, janë një dokument i përbashkët për institucionet publike, si Bashkia e Tiranës, Ministria e Kulturës, shoqërinë civile dhe sektorin privat. Ndër to theksohet nevoja për 33 veprime nëpërmjet 5 instrumentave strategjik për një proçes gjithëpërfshirës dhe të qëndrueshëm për vendimmarrjen dhe artet për të gjithë grupet e interesit, për tu arritur ndërmjet Partneritetit Civil- Publik- Privat (PCPP) që reflekton, edukon dhe përfshin komunitetet në procesin e imagjinimit, prodhimit dhe shijimit të arteve publike.

Ekphrasis Studio është organizata e parë në Shqipëri mbështetur nga UNESCO- Fondi Ndërkombëtar për Larmshmërinë Kulturore, për më tepër info www.EkphrasisStudio.com, www.HARP.al ose vizitoni Qendrën Kulturore Komunitare dhe Ndërkombëtare DITArt në Tiran

PUBLIC ART POLICY AND ACTION PLAN (2019-2024) for TIRANA, 2019

PUBLIC ART POLICY AND ACTION PLAN (2019-2024) for TIRANA Recommendations for Civil-Public-Private... more PUBLIC ART POLICY AND ACTION PLAN (2019-2024) for TIRANA
Recommendations for Civil-Public-Private Partnership (PCPP)

On June 24, 2019, at the Monument of Friendship in Tirana, a meeting was held by Ekphrasis Studio, NPO in arts and culture management, that submitted recommendations to representatives of Tirana Municipality and the Ministry of Culture, for a Policy and Action Plan (2019-2024) for arts in public spaces in Tirana, according to the bottom up methodology,

The recommendations for these strategic documents are based on various activities by Project HARP.al – Public Arts Space over 16 months in Tirana, including the digital map of public arts in Tirana, research, the publication “Artistic Expressions of Past and Present“, workshops, meetings with artists, an international conference, analysis reports about 770 completed questionnaires, including businesses, NGOs, citizens, artists, etc.

These recommendations for a 5-year Policy and Action Plan for Arts in Public Spaces in Tirana are a common document for public institutions, such as the Municipality of Tirana and the Ministry of Culture, civil society and the private sector. The document proposes 33 actions through 5 strategic instruments for a comprehensive and sustainable decision and art making process for all stakeholders, through Civil Public-Private Partnerships (PCPPs) that reflect, educate and involve communities in the process of imagination, production and enjoyment of public arts.

Ekphrasis Studio is the first organization in Albania supported by the UNESCO – International Fund for Cultural Diversity. For more info: www.EkphrasisStudio.com, www.HARP.al or visit the Community and International Cultural Center DITArt in Tirana

Cultures of History Forum, 2017

On 22 November 2014 a multi-level underground bunker on the outskirts of Tirana, the Albanian cap... more On 22 November 2014 a multi-level underground bunker on the outskirts of Tirana, the Albanian capital city, was opened to the public for the first time. The bunker had originally been constructed in the 1970s, during the country’s socialist period, as part of the widespread transformation of public space and landscape that took place during the 1960s and 1970s, and was intended to house the heads of state in the event of a nuclear attack on the nation. The bunker’s aggressively publicized reopening as Bunk’Art – a combination museum and art installation space – is one of the most fraught and complex attempts on the part of the Albanian government to come to terms with the nation’s recent history, according to the museum’s website. The space, paradoxically devoted both to the period of fascist occupation in Albania and to the subsequent period of isolationist socialist dictatorship, intertwines a plethora of documents, photographs, and museum installations of questionable historical veracity. Bunk’Art represents a unique confluence of aesthetic discourses, strategies of memory-production, and policies related to architectural heritage and tourism, and the museum offers a particularly poignant example of post-socialist political manoeuvring vis-à-vis the socialist past.

In the spring of 2016, a group of students, activists, and artists began to discuss the formation... more In the spring of 2016, a group of students, activists, and artists began to discuss the formation of a collective to oppose the hegemonic structures of capitalism and neoliberal politics and economics in contemporary Albania. From these discussions, a group of street artists—individually anonymous but known collectively as Çeta—emerged. The group is made up of members of various ages and backgrounds: designers, political scientists, architects, artists, and physicists. Different members carry out the design and execution of individual works at different times, according to the needs of the group and their commitments to other forms of political action in a given period. Çeta’s wheat pastes and stencils evidence the presence of a true dissident artistic movement in the capital of Tirana, a movement that refuses to cooperate with the dominant political parties in the country and, at the same time, rejects the ideological neutrality that frequently characterizes the Albanian contemporary art scene. Çeta’s works draw attention to the political systems that exploit the poor, the working classes, and minority communities, as well as the forms of rhetoric that obscure the plight of these groups in the name of socioeconomic progress and European integration. Çeta’s actions and interventions push back against the growing spectacle of prosperity in Albania, against official narratives proclaiming that the Albanian people are satisfied with their lives, their surroundings, and their government. Recently, the current mayor of Tirana began a campaign aimed at “beautifying” the city by a variety of means, including commissioning works of street art. In reaction to this spectacle, Çeta has sought to turn the walls of Tirana back against the political elites that continue to privatize the city and exploit its citizens.

catalogue for a solo exhibition by Kyle Kogut at the Stamp Gallery, University of Maryland, Colle... more catalogue for a solo exhibition by Kyle Kogut at the Stamp Gallery, University of Maryland, College Park, January 24-March 17, 2018