Memory spills everywhere in Tirana. Obsessively so, because memory is at once buried and fragmented in part by the urgency of diving into a future of moving closer to the European Union with its promise of progressive standards. However, Albanian cultural identity in Tirana revealed itself to be strong and proudly expressed: I was invited at every corner to taste food that filled the air with an oil-fried scent. I was beckoned to dance to music blasted from car windows at night, and to meet people inhabiting an architectural palimpsest of histories of colonial and political occupation. Buildings from the Ottoman to the Italian periods clash and blend, forming an uneven horizon, where Bitcoin real estate towers provide a backdrop that rises over sober communist forms.
The effects of the totalitarian People’s Socialist Republic (1946–1991)—which came to power after defeating Italian occupation—still bleed through the collective body as a kind of intergenerational incommunicability. The trauma of elders, those who endured political incarceration and martial executions, still seeks resolution, if not healing, but this has been interrupted by diasporic youth who, in a severed bond with their country, contend with a process of racialization and the subsumption of their local traditions into globalizing capitalism. Contemporary art workers in Albania are seeking to bridge and repair this generational rupture.
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This is one of the purposes of Tirana Art Weekend in its second edition: a community effort organized by AVAN (Albanian Visual Arts Network), a collection of independent organizations united to address their concerns through the visual arts. In the words of Board member Amantia Peza, the weekend is "an initiative to make visible the cultural scene so it can be supported by cultural policies." Tirana Art Weekend leverages art practices despite the absence of substantial state support or funding for artists or art infrastructures in Albania. AVAN is a smart, self-organized operation aimed at reclaiming access to resources essential for building a local, enduring cultural scene.
During my stay and in many of my conversations, nobody hid information about economic precarity or the basic resource upholding the entire endeavor: community. Even the artistic director of Villa 31, an international artists' residency operating in Paris and Tirana, revealed that while the state provides the building for free (it is the former residence of the country’s Cold War dictator, Enver Hoxha), it is funding from the private foundation Art Explora that transforms the historical site into a meeting place for cultural agents from the entire Balkan region. Such transparency about material conditions felt radical in itself.
At Triana Art Weekend, nineteen independent spaces showcased distinctive exhibitions at AVAN Villa—formerly the Institute for the Integration of Political Victims. The Villa became an outpost where people gathered to share ideas, drink, and dance at the temporary and site-specific Bar Tore. Each local art space was given a room to showcase artists and practices addressing contested aspects of Albanian history, or the body as a site of resistance and self-affirmation, or narrative forms that challenge temporal linearity, as well as the reemergence of personal storytelling speaking, both from and to diasporic Albanian communities.
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At the ground level of AVAN Villa and across from the Agimi Art Center and Tulla Cultural Center sits the commissioned five-chapter exhibition by the curator Arnold Braho. Titled Re-Enacting a Fable, it inquires into the morphology of traditional storytelling, departing from archival materials of the film director Xhanfise Keko and the feminist teacher and playwright Urani Rumbo, who used theater as a pedagogical tool of political emancipation. The exhibition explores their respective careers, which spanned the 19th and 20th centuries, including work done with children and with women's assemblies.
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Moving beyond historical documentation, the exhibition speculatively articulates where and how stories can be gleaned from many voices rather than being imposed as a monolithic narrative. This approach finds beautiful expression in Genny Petrotta's Novelline (2025), a film dedicated to the folk tales collected in the Sicilian town, notorious for its Albanian diaspora, Piana degli Albanesi, by Cristina Gentile Mandalà (1856–1919), one of the earliest Arbëreshë women writers and a key figure in documenting oral narrative traditions. The film employs ritualized gestures recalling the communal contexts where these stories were traditionally transmitted, often during collective labor such as spinning.
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To enter the exhibition's core, one must pass through Anna Ehrenstein’s curtain carrying the inscription, in bold letters: “HOME IS WHERE YOUR HATRED IS”—a sharp articulation of the German-Albanian artist's conflictual relationship with her country of origin. Gerta Xhaferaj's video installation The Censorship of the Flowers (2024) confronts the incompleteness of history, even in private memory, during political repression. Segments representing flowers, or perhaps the people near them, are cut from footage of Xhaferaj's family events, an act of self-censorship that makes visible what authoritarian forces silenced.
Sonja Azizaj translates the vulnerability of a shifting landscape in a panel of poems from her archive, poems composed in Tirana during the city's accelerated transformation. The texts trace and commemorate the urban landscape and the intimate shifts it provokes in the author’s body: a lyric resistance to the violence of urban capital.
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At Tulla Art Center, Blerta Haziraj showcases ongoing research on the Women's Antifascist Front of Kosovo, a mass movement emerging from the partisan struggle of World War II. After the war, these women organized rural communities, initiated large-scale unveiling campaigns, and promoted education, collectivization, and the ideal of a new socialist woman. A powerful wall piece features in a photo of young women wearing handkerchiefs as scarves, looking at the camera and each other. Below is the following writing: E lirë me kenë unë due me shoqe me u gëzue… (I'd love to go out with my girlfriends and have fun…). The work gives voice to a newly formed collectivity raising its voice against the patronization of women's bodies and the male imposition of public unveiling, revealing how emancipation requires women’s own self-determination, not paternalistic liberation imposed from above.
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On the first floor of the AVAN Villa, Galeria e Bregdetit, the space initiated by Elian Stefa, director of AVAN, hosts photos by Antonio Ottomanelli. The series, titled Re-Reading Gaza, reframes the built landscape of the Gaza Strip as an arena of movement and memory, where young practitioners engage in parkour. The central photo, wherein a young man floats in the air against the backdrop of rubble, made me think about how falling, like dancing, can be a powerful form of resistance to gravity, the pull of inflicted and accumulated violence onto the Palestinian body.
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Exiting the Galeria e Bregdetit, a rickety wooden staircase leads to the section curated by Tek Bunkeri: a social innovation initiative invested in participatory cultural work bridging Albanian rural and metropolitan communities. For Art Weekend, Tek Bunkeri presents Antimuseum, an animated video where poetics and politics intertwine in order to recount torture and trauma inflicted on Albanian dissident youth during the days of the Socialist Republic. The work details the maze of betrayal and longing that shaped that time, where music became a tool for perpetuating violence in prisons, with inmates facing no clear accusation or a trial.
Tek Bunkeri's humane and sensitive inquiry into the political excavation of feelings and memory continued at the premiere of the documentary In Search of Poetry at Agimi Art Center. The film immerses viewers in a collective recall of hidden histories of communist labor camps, where detainees were stripped of political rights and made to work in heavy construction or mining labor. The narrative follows a 75-year-old man who was incarcerated in Spac Prison at the age of 28. During his forced labor building a housing complex, he hid a little paper treasure in the walls: a friend's poetry. Entering the flats now owned by new tenants, we see how time connects. How the present is bent and enjoined to collaborate in shedding light on the past, and how material structures hold memory that state narratives try to bury.
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The weekend spun across the city, offering visibility to neighborhoods and regional initiatives, including Bazement Art Space. There, I observed three older men, clearly not from the art world, making space among us, waiting to see themselves in the wall-sized video projection. It was a refreshing encounter after days of seeing the same faces before the different artworks. Their presence made it clear that community involvement behind Blerta Hoçia's solo show, Whispers Under the Relentless March, had resonated in the neighborhood. Hoçia's inquiry listens to faint murmurs beneath the accelerating sounds of change: workers in labor struggles seek to safeguard the landscape from extraction, and courtyards where longtime residents built enclosed altars to the passing of time are fixed in photographs. Here, the voices of those men inhabiting the courtyards are, at last, given a platform.
My last night concluded at Bar Thaka in a gentrified neighborhood, Blloku, described by local youth as where former spies would drink coffee in the morning, and now hipsters go there to get drunk in the evening, a loop of hegemonic generational substitution. Covered in wooden panels with a rustic atmosphere where you could buy Albanian wine, raki, and meatball sandwiches, it hosted the last chapter of Re-Enacting a Fable. Gerta Xhaferaj presented on the bar's screen, normally dedicated to football matches, a video installation reflecting on migration and the doubling of the body during travel; the body in motion searches itself by following other bodies on the streets. An ambient live sound performance by zerocase & nica2cica and Sindi Ziu offered additional reflection on the city's zones of silence amid its otherwise pervasive clamor.
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Tirana, with a past that forces us to confront the ruthless violence of every ideological position fixated in totalitarian structures, and with an inextinguishable desire to confront such histories, enchanted me. From a deep wound that traverses time and mends its ruptures, art emerges as a confession of unresolvedness and an admission of its own insufficiency as a singular catalyst for self-inquiry and renewal of imagination.
But Tirana’s Art Weekend does more: it calls us to observe all the forces redrawing the outline of the city and the cultural habits of its inhabitants, and, therefore, it demands we examine the infrastructures upholding it. This rhizomatic conceptual endeavour offers a template for regions where capitalist development defines spaces and communities (while systematically ignoring the cultural infrastructures that might resist it). By mapping the urgent needs of both institutional and grassroots art scenes, charting where they align and where they diverge, the initiative builds collective pressure on those in power to address cultural precarity. The question that emerges is whether such grassroots power can become a vector for genuine autonomy, or whether it will remain a disposable supplement to the pervasive capitalist system.
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- Images
Cover: 3. Jona Krasniqi, Where Do Thoughts Go, 2025. Courtesy the artist and Art House Foundation
Fig.1 Tirana Art Weekend Headquarters, 2024. Credit Photo Giulia Dajci, Courtesy of Albanian Visual Arts Network
Fig.2 Bar Tore, Credit Photo Giulia Dajci, Courtesy of Albanian Visual Arts Network
Fig.3 TAWE25, Installation view Vila.
Fig.4 Genny Petrotta's Novelline (2025), installation view. Courtesy of Albanian Visual Arts Network
Fig.5 Anna Ehrenstein, HOME IS WHERE YOUR HATRED IS (2025), installation view. Courtesy of Albanian Visual Arts Network
Fig.6 Gerta Xhaferaj, The Censorship of the Flowers (2024), installation view. Courtesy of Albanian Visual Arts Network
Fig.7 Antonio Ottomanelli, Re-Reading Gaza (2013), installation view. Courtesy of Albanian Visual Arts Network
Fig.8 Tek Bunkeri, Antimuseum (2025), installation view. Courtesy of Albanian Visual Arts Network
Fig.9 Tek Bunkeri, In Search of Poetry, installation view. Courtesy of Albanian Visual Arts Network
Fig.10 Bazement Art Space, Photo Giulia Dajci Photo
Fig.11 Thaka-Zeni.
