by Adela Lovric // Dec. 23, 2025
Tirana is having a moment. Its vibrant energy, pleasant climate and affordability are widely marketed to tourists, but the city doesn’t win over with tidy impressions. It reveals itself through jagged layers of architecture and history. Surprise is part of its texture, and expectations are routinely undone on arrival. As a Croatian, I didn’t anticipate any particular revelation—we share plenty of the same blessings and curses, both past and present. Tirana’s contemporary art scene, however, remained an open question. Attending Tirana Art Weekend with skepticism shaped by the proliferation of art weekends across European capitals, I expected a familiar choreography that flatters dominant Western sensibilities. Instead, the event felt grounded in local urgencies, borrowing an international framework while articulating its own terms.
AVAN Villa, Tirana Art Weekend 2025 // Photo by Zeni Alia
Tirana Art Weekend launched last year as the first public initiative of the Albanian Visual Arts Network, assembling key actors from the country’s independent art scene under a shared, city-wide program. Last month, in its second edition, a constellation of exhibition spaces, cultural organizations and artistic initiatives once again synchronized their programs with Albania’s Independence Day on November 28th, which marks the 1912 declaration of independence from the Ottoman Empire, and Liberation Day on November 29th, which commemorates the end of Nazi occupation. This temporal convergence foregrounded the layered histories that collide in the collective psyche, like a lingering hangover, and continue to structure Albania’s present. Many featured artworks dealt with this concern: from excavations of nearly-forgotten antifascist struggles to the recovery of traumatic memories of brutality under the communist regime, and onward to grappling with capitalism that continues to corrode the urban fabric and the labor that sustains it.
The main hub was housed in the former headquarters of the Institute for the Integration of Former Political Victims, a restored early-20th-century villa that bears the imprint of Albania’s stratified past. While art spaces opened their doors across the city, the villa housed initiatives without a permanent venue or those based outside of Tirana. Each room of its upper floor hosted a distinct project, mapping the Albanian art scene as both highly diverse and tightly connected. Young, ambitious initiatives such as Prag Space Collective and s t r a y stars showcased work alongside established and locally influential platforms, including Shkodër-based Art House and Vlorë’s Galeria e Bregdetit.
Renis Hyka: ‘Antimuseum,’ 2025, installation view at AVAN Villa, Tirana Art Weekend 2025 // Photo by Zeni Alia
In a small turret above the upper floor, an intimate space housed a single work presented by Tek Bunkeri. ‘Antimuseum’ (2025), a short animated film directed by Renis Hyka, written by Dionis Prifti and animated by the collective Trivet, draws on testimonies of former political prisoners under the communist regime—from pervasive surveillance to baseless persecution and torture that left lifelong physical and psychic scars. The spatial isolation of the screening was well matched to the film’s vulnerable uncovering of memory and trauma. For someone encountering these stories for the first time, it offered an emotional entry point to a past so painful it resists articulation.
On the villa’s ground floor, a group exhibition formed part of ‘Re-enact a Fable,’ the first installment of a newly introduced strand within the Tirana Art Weekend program. Curated by Arnold Braho, the project extended across five sites in the city, with the villa functioning as its central anchor. Drawing on the structure of the fable, Braho used it as a lens for thinking through how stories, gestures and forms of knowledge are transmitted, revised and reshaped, whether through personal and diasporic memory, collective practice or experiments in autonomy and self-organization.
Xhanfise Keko: ‘A Palace Uprising,’ 1972, part of ‘Re-enact a Fable’ at AVAN Villa, Tirana Art Weekend 2025 // Photo by Zeni Alia
The exhibition opened with archival material that pointed to counter-pedagogical strategies developed during periods of extreme political repression in Albania, which remain instructive to this day. In Xhanfise Keko’s film ‘A Palace Uprising’ (1972), children are cast as self-determined subjects capable of operating outside established hierarchies. Presented alongside was Urani Rumbo’s 1920 manifesto demanding women’s rights to equality, education and social participation. Rumbo worked closely with women’s communities in southern Albania, cultivating public performance, cultural participation and political agency within a deeply patriarchal society.
Works by contemporary Albanian and Albanian-diaspora artists—including Driant Zeneli, Genny Petrotta and Renid Tosuni—occupied the adjoining rooms. Anna Ehrenstein’s contribution—a vinyl curtain emblazoned with the phrase “Home Is Where the Hatred Is,” borrowed from Gil Scott-Heron’s 1971 song—cut across a long corridor, functioning as both a physical and symbolic interruption. The gesture resonated with Ehrenstein’s recent participation in Art Explora’s residency at nearby Vila 31. Today, the villa hosts international artists for three-month stays; historically, however, it served as the private residence of Enver Hoxha, whose regime relied on mass surveillance, forced labor camps and the systematic persecution of dissent.
Anna Ehrenstein: ‘Home Is Where the Hatred Is,’ 2025, part of ‘Re-enact a Fable’ at AVAN Villa, Tirana Art Weekend 2025 // Photo by Zeni Alia
Under Hoxha, both the villa and the surrounding Blloku neighborhood were closed to the public, accessible only to high-ranking party officials. While the regime publicly denounced art and culture and severed Albania’s ties with the outside world, the villa’s interior was decorated with paintings that served its ideological aims. As part of her Art Explora residency, Ehrenstein intervened in this charged setting by replacing some of the original display with abstract paintings by her late uncle, Ali Oseku, an acclaimed Albanian artist who spent years imprisoned under Hoxha’s regime. A similar gesture of reclamation appeared in the second part of ‘Re-enact a Fable’ at Vila 31, where Erdiola Kanda Mustafaj’s sound and video works introduced ancestral purification rituals, quietly countering the site’s repressive history.
At Tulla Culture Center, the third part of Braho’s project foregrounded gesture as both historical method and political tool in the work of Blerta Haziraj, Enxhi Mehmeti and Silvi Naçi. Haziraj’s research-driven installation revisited the Women’s Antifascist Front of Kosovo, assembling videos, photographs and archival documents that trace a largely sidelined female genealogy. In this context, the archive is treated not as a stable repository but as a reparative structure that allows disorder and incompleteness to become productive. Labor came into sharper focus in the fourth part of the project—a screening of short films at Agimi Art Center. Among them, Genny Petrotta’s ‘Mamma Perdonami / Mëma më fal’ (2023-24) stood out for its distinctive poetic register and engagement with political inheritance. The film revisits the short-lived peasant republic proclaimed in 1944 in Piana degli Albanesi by a group of young rebels led by the artist’s grandfather, Giacomo Petrotta. Before it was crushed by the police, the autonomous republic lasted 50 days, defying big landowners and fascist elites who had left the population to starve.
‘Re-enact a Fable’ at Bar Thaka, Tirana Art Weekend 2025 // Photo by Zeni Alia
Finally, the fifth part abandoned art world conventions, reconvening the audience at Thaka Bar, an old-school local pub facing imminent closure. Gerta Xhaferaj’s audiovisual intervention dissolved into the bar’s usual clamor, as the steady flow of drinks took precedence over the authority of the artwork.
Tirana Art Weekend’s dispersed program nodes formed a temporary yet resonant network, mapping not only Albania’s artistic ecosystem but also its unresolved history. Rather than dissociating from or erasing these complexities, the artists worked through their layers and within the literal walls that bear their marks, reclaiming and repairing what persists. The event revealed a determination to confront the ghosts of the past while building new support systems for the future. In a context marked by chronic underfunding, limited institutional support and the near-absence of an art market, these efforts amount to a strong assertion of a collectivist spirit and of art as a necessity, which will hopefully remain at the base of future editions.
