Solo show / Tulla Art Center / Tirana 2013
A possible approach to the work of Ledia Kostandini lies in her artistic appropriation of public space. She isn´t an urban-art artist “per se” but probably one of the few in Albania. At the same time, she isn´t a conceptual artists in the classical sense. Her work is basically starting from a sensual and provocative perspective. Her art is a juxtaposition of the environment that surrounds her and her very personal, as well as our shared possibilities to perceive it. The starting points of her actual series are informal space expansions which she is observing and capturing in her neighborhood. This form of additional production of space provides a local response to the featureless urban development of Tirana after 1990. With a humorous gesture that is typical for her, Ledia Kostandini detracts those informal structures from their original context and takes possession of them. With “Blockwork”, this art invention comes for the first time into dialogue with the exhibition place. Even though it is directly thought into an exhibition space, there is an immediate relation to the outside. The observation of the intersecting relationships of open, spontaneous and closed, established structures is fundamental to the work. The dominant motive of the window highlights the confrontation between inner and outer space, the public and the private.
At the same time “Blockworks” expose their immanent ambivalence between temporary and permanent while being elements of a transitional architecture existing momentarily in the framework of an exhibition. The artist intensifies this perspective on (architectural) components that shape the cityscape through a further alienation of the chosen elements. The structures are amplified pictorially and disintegrated from their original context and as a result they are becoming witnesses of their own transition. The artistically formulation of Kostandini’s carries the handwriting of the urban, the techniques she is using, paste ups and mural painting are borrowed from the public space. Through the foreign infiltration and the dominant presence of pink threads, that keeps the chaos together but can't be traced to their source, not without irony the gaze is channeled to the spontaneity of this form of self- determination that synchronistically stems from an undetermined collective organism. "Blockworks" depict, the exchange ratio of residents in a dense city where architecture enrolls the experience of a dynamic urbanism. Taking the step to transfer her urban inventions to an exhibition space, Ledia Kostandini doesn't lose her playful and personal language that she gains from observing her environment. “Blockwork” affiliates to a greater context of Kostandinis work.
Exhibition text by: Annika Hirsekorn
Article by Eleni Laperi
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