Miza Gallery / Tirana / 2013-2014
Text: Eriola Pira
Ledia Kostandini closed the year 2012 with a studio visit. Everyone was invited. The artist’s studio (which she still shares with her colleague, Matilda Odobashi) was transformed into a Salon full of art and life. Previously exposed work, work in progress, discussions, gaiety, coffee and wine, all was served to art-lovers for four days. The artist and her art presented themselves generously, straightforwardly, without the framing of an exhibition or the contextualization of the next curator. It’s rare that we, the public, have such direct access to an artist, let alone her studio, which we imagine as a mysterious place where the artistic process and the work of art are conceptualized and realized before we encounter it in the gallery or elsewhere. Last year’s invitation for a studio visit was a sort of demystification of the artist and a re-introduction to her, by bringing the artist, as well as her labor and artwork closer to the public, who has lost links with the artist as much as contact with art.
Ledia Kostandini will close out the year 2013 at Miza Gallery. Not in her studio, but there she will be welcoming you this holiday season. What was conceptualized over this past year has taken form, personality, and demands attention and value. The invitation to this exhibition -- the last of their first year -- comes from Miza. The end of the year occasion comes as an offer to reformat, redefine, and re-present the self, our appearance, vision, thought, and approach to the everyday and that which surrounds us. Ledia treats things full of energy and intensity, sometimes with sincere and sometimes with grotesque humor, by changing their function, meaning, and value, by adding elements and other object-parts, not very differently to what happens in beauty salons, gyms, and under the plastic surgeons knife. The objects and installations at Miza follow in the trail of the Surrealists of the early 20th Century and the legacy of Duchamp in the 21st, in a post-industrial context of global production and consumption, where criticism and the celebration of this political, economic and cultural order don’t much differ from one another, if they aren’t the same altogether.
Eriola Pira
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