Let Us Meet In Between ~ Postpostcards

Solo exhibition - Mia Museum, Palace with Cubes, Tirana Center - 15- 30 November 2025

https://www.instagram.com/p/DRPwUqijfnX/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MXNzd2VrdTQ3NGI3bA==

explore Room 1 & 2 of the exhibition

explore Room 3 of the exhibition

explore Room + of the exhibition

Scroll down for the curatorial text by Endri Dani.

Dear audience,

Let Us Meet in Between is a deliberate and ongoing project by multimedia artist Ledia Kostandini, aimed at awakening our collective memory through a collection of postcards. Rather than simply transporting us back in time, these postcards invite us to observe the world we inhabit today with open eyes and attentive awareness.

At the heart of this long-term project, begun in 2011 and still unfolding, lies a box of old postcards preserved in the Kostandini family home. Sent by friends and acquaintances to her grandfather, Gjergji, and his four children, these postcards bear witness to an annual ritual of communication and well-wishing during the year-end holidays. From the 1950s through the late 1980s, they convey a delicate form of exchange — traces of sincerity, care, and generosity that quietly permeated the walls of autocratic cities.

On the front of the postcards, images of cities, factories, and monuments reflect a state-imposed macro-aesthetic; on the back, handwritten messages convey the equinox of interpersonal relationships. The sterility of official imagery is emotionally vernacularized through the poetic authenticity of the words, handwritten by ordinary citizens.

Ledia reactivates this encounter through a fourteen-year-long journey. By following the past viewpoints of anonymous photographers, she places her body and eye within the same urban coordinates, photographing the spaces from the same perspective. In this way, each journey becomes an act of rediscovery — an opportunity to grasp the metamorphosis of the landscape and how Albanian cities have evolved under layers of power and ideas, superimposed upon one another. The resulting images honor both the dignity of the landscape and the memory it carries.

The exhibition’s location — an apartment in the ‘Pallati me Kuba,’ (The Palace with Cubes) designed by Maks Velo — adds a layer of meaning. Within this building, monumental modernism collides with the personal and collective dramas of an era. This palace, where dissent is manifested in the silhouettes of its volumes, has become an intermediary space in which the tensions of cities as intergenerational constructs and human ideals naturally intersect with the subjects of the exhibition.

The apartment, once a home and soon to become a museum of material culture, “Made in Albania,” holds within it the energy of transition. In its still-empty spaces, Ledia’s postcards open a path for sustained reflection on how power permeates form, design, and imagery.

Let Us Meet in Between invites us to listen, through the voice of our inner selves, to the voices of ordinary people, which awaken the poetry of solidarity in everyday life. The ephemeral resonance of the human dimension conveyed through the words on these postcards seems to take on the task of purifying the tainted air of modernist rooms — an air that once oxygenated the ideological spirit inscribed through linguistic norms, seeping into the most fragile realms of human feeling.

In the silence of the cities of the past and in Ledia’s new, equally silent images, a meeting occurs: between the past and the present, the collective and the intimate, the human and civilization. Amid the utopian stillness of a world shaped by rule and domination, the artist invites us to meet again, to reflect, and to speak with one another in simple words — in between.

Wishing you health, harmony, and joy in your family.

Endri Dani

November, London 2025