"Painting a Backdrop for Lumturi Blloshmi," in the catalog Lumturi Blloshmi: From Scratch (Venice Bienale 2022 and National Gallery of Kosova), ed. Adela Demetja (original) (raw)
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Art Studies/ Studime për Artin, 2023
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.
Post-communist Realities in Albanian Contemporary Art
Ermir Hoxha, 2018
At the end of the millennium, Albania and Albanian art were at a turning point in their history. In the search for modernity, using different aesthetic approaches and mediums, some of their themes dealt with the near past - the communist one. In a decade, what seemed to be a trend turned out to be a real focus. The generation of young, contemporary Albanian artists, ensconced in every modern aspect of life, started to analyse and study the country’s communist heritage, and also to use it as a source for their work. This paper offers a view on this trend; the way in which the contemporary deals with the past, from the artist’s and art’s point of view.
I Lived Without Seeing These Artworks: (Albanian) Socialist Realism and/against Contemporary Art
ARTMargins, 2021
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.
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 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.
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 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."
Art Studies/ Studime për Artin, 2024
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?
“The Red Kiss of the Past That Does Not Pass”: State Socialism in Albanian Visual Art Today
Visual Anthropology Review, 2017
This article examines memory work in recent Albanian visual art. My research has focused on the artwork of a generation of Albanian artists who have only lived their youth through the state socialist period and have now been turning to socialist subjects and symbolism, which they represent in novel and playful ways. Some of these artists offer nuanced reflections on the socialist past and its legacies, and others use the past to highlight what unsettles them about the present. These artworks further extend and complicate today's state-sanctioned discourses and practices on socialism, thus making an important intervention about how the socialist experience is remembered in the present.
Journal of Educational and Social Research
This article tries to give a vivid frame of the historical background of the development of figurative art in both sides of Albanian boarders, thus that of Kosovo and Albania, as a unique belonging of the same national features. It is represented through a historical and theoretical background so that to show the roots and the layers of the development of art in Europe, which is in all senses the impact Albanian art, but not only has taken from. Pure and concrete examples of Albanian painters of the very first generation and as an inspiration to what follows later, are given to demonstrate the will and need of Albanian society to cultivate artistic tastes.
Third Text, 2018
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.
Albanian alternative artists vs. offi cial art under communism
HISTORY OF COMMUNISM IN EUROPE 2, 2011
Behind the European Iron Curtain another "iron curtain" was drawn, between Albania and the rest of the socialist countries in Europe. Its architect was the dictator Enver Hoxha, who constructed Albanian national identity as a gated community based upon the dialectics of inclusion and exclusion. As a result, "socialist realism" Albanian art under communism can be diff erentiated clearly from art in other socialist countries. Political power and ideas on culture and particularly on painting meant birth of an offi cial kind of art, parallel with an alternative art which I named painting in the shadow. Th e idea of painting in the shadow gives creators the possibility to operate on two levels. Th e fi rst is the internal, psychologically sequential level of the creative process itself. Th is refers to selective activities and elaborate ideas using pictorial means from forbidden modern art-impressionism, expressionism, abstractionism. On the second level, artists operate beyond individual intentions just to indicate political position and rhetorical application of specifi c ideological regulations. Both levels are of interest to art practices in that they serve to reinforce artists' position in offi cial art in general, and to develop the artistic avatar on the private scene of painting in the shadow in particular. I am interested here in the fi rst level, where avatars of Albanian artists under communism can be diff erentiated due to aspects of their styles and courage to react beyond the offi cial rules. Th e basic problem with the contemporary interpretation of that unknown painting in the shadow is that it does not seem to take account of the fact that viewers nowadays are free to interpret, while painters were brought to heel in the face of the "method of socialist realism".