Artists in residence,
Vila 31 x Art Explora, Tirana
This new programme of residencies will host a dynamic cultural program designed in collaboration with the local players (or stakeholders), institutions, schools and associations to deliver exhibitions, workshops, film screenings, discussions, symposia and festivals open to all.
Around thirty artists will be selected each year by an international selection committee.
2026 Residents
First session - from January to March
Poland
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Agnieszka Mastalerz, Poland
“Silk as a Metaphor for Progress and Destruction”
Biography
Agnieszka Mastalerz was born in 1991 in Łodź, Poland. Lives and works between Warsaw and Bieszczady Mountains, Poland. Her work revolves around mechanisms of control and the processes that influence and exploit the individual. Rooted in research, her practice is primarily video-based, often integrating both analog and scientific imaging techniques as well as performative elements. Agnieszka’s projects have been presented during Ekraini i Artit video Festival in Shkodra, Albania (2025), at Catinca Tabacaru Gallery in Bucharest, Romania (2024), NSDokumentazionszentrum in Munich, Germany (2023), Manifesta 14 Prishtina, Kosovo (2022), and MAXXI in Rome, Italy (2021). Previous residencies include Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany (2025), Muzeum Susch in Switzerland (2021), the Artist Development Program in Luxembourg (2021).
Residency project
During the Art Explora Residency in Tirana, I will be developing an ongoing body of work that investigates sericulture as both a historical practice and a symbolic framework. My interest in silk lies in its entanglement with narratives of domestication, transformation, and dependency, as well as in its visual and metaphorical richness. The project draws inspiration from W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn (1995), where silk becomes a lens through which to explore civilization’s cyclical relationship to destruction and progress. Following Sebald’s use of silk as a material metaphor, I examine the domesticated silkworm whose life is halted at the pupal stage – not allowed to transform. In this stilled metamorphosis, I see an image of systemic arrest, a microcosm of exploitative dynamics extending across species, technologies, and ideologies. Through this vulnerable entity, I interrogate the broader consequences of anthropocentrism and the ways care and violence intertwine in human-nonhuman relations
Greece
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Amalia Vekri, Greece
“Notes on Silenced Memories”
Biography
Amalia Vekri was born in Athens, where she lives and works. Her practice, which primarily spans painting and drawing, with occasional explorations into other media, examines how literature and popular culture construct canons and behavioural codes that shape our relationship to the body. Her work has been presented at a range of institutions and galleries, including the House of Cyprus, Greece (2024), Cascina Idea, Italy (2023), the Breeder gallery, Greece (2023), Pori Art Museum, Finland (2021), and the DESTE Foundation, Greece (2019). In parallel with her artistic practice, she is also the artistic director of Haus N Athen
Residency project
During her residency at Villa 31 Amalia Vekri will explore how female identity is mythologised, controlled, and rendered monstrous across Balkan folklore and political history. Her project will focus on Albania’s post-communist legacy, oral traditions, and silenced voices, focusing on the stories of the Shtriga (female vampire) and Musine Kokalari, one of the first female prose writers and political dissidents in Albania. Working across a variety of mediums, the project will draw from shared regional archetypes - Shtriga is similar to the Greek Lamia - figures that embody cultural anxieties around female anger and autonomy. A three-part workshop series, Shared Vessels, will engage participants in readings, story telling and creating objects as a way to reclaim agency over their personal and ancestral stories, while contributing to a shared archive.
Turkey
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Betül Aksu, Turkey
“Vranofça Archive: In the Thread of Things”
Biography
Betül Aksu was born in 1990 in İzmir, Turkey, and works between İzmir and London. Her practice investigates how migrants navigate the borders of everyday life, focusing on the role of bureaucratic language in shaping movement, access, and identity. Through installation, performance, text, video, and print, she examines language as a space where control is exerted and resisted. Betül Aksu's work has been presented at Sharjah Biennial 16, UAE (2025); MoCA Skopje, North Macedonia (2025); AVTO, Turkey (2024); Material, Switzerland (2024); and sezon, Turkey (2023). She was an artist-in-residence at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA), Ireland (2025) and has taken part in programmes at BAK, Utrecht, and the Istanbul Biennial Research and Production Programme.
Residency project
Vranofça Archive: In the Thread of Things continues my long-term research into the histories of Muslim Macedonian families who migrated from Yugoslavia to Turkey in the 1950s, a movement that shaped my own family’s story. Through personal narratives, photographs, recipes, oral histories and video, the archive considers how memory is carried in everyday gestures and domestic practices, and how these forms of knowledge often remain unrecorded by institutional history. Working at Vila 31, the former residence of Enver Hoxha, places these intimate memories within a site that once embodied the authority of the state and its control over public narrative. The residency creates a setting in which domestic memory and political history confront one another, revealing the tension between lived experience and the official story. During my time in Tirana, I will continue developing the archive through site visits to North Macedonian archives and to the village my family migrated from, exploring how these traces can be brought together through video, text and shared encounters.
Kosovo
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Dardan Zhegrova, Kosovo
“LUCKY PIERRE: Ouroboros "
Biography
Dardan Zhegrova’s works are object- and performance-oriented, and are more frequently inspired by poems that serve as the standing point for the conception of a new work. His texts relate to partially fictional and actually experienced events, which are mostly recounted in a first-person perspective. Oftentimes the narrator addresses an (imaginary) counterpart, sought after by the artist. There are no pronouns like she and he – the narrative unfolds between the I and the You. Here the border between the artist as a subject and the person addressed often seems to blur. This dissolution of the conventions of a classical narrative form can also be seen in relation to structures of temporality in poetry, where the future, present, and past seem to merge. This collapse of the different boundaries in Zhegrova’s work also reflects his queer identity, which oscillates between female and male attributes, and deliberately rejects and transcends a normative understanding of gender.
Zhegrova has been represented by LambdaLambdaLambda Gallery in Prishtina since 2015, with several solo and group exhibitions. He received the Artists of Tomorrow award in 2016, leading to a residency at Residency Unlimited, New York. He was also in residence at Swiss Institute, New York (2020), and Akademie der Künste der Welt, Cologne (2024). His work has been shown in Manifesta 14, Prishtina (2022); Brand New Ancients, National Gallery of Kosova (2023); A Model, MUDAM, Luxembourg (2024); and Silent Threads, Resounding Kosova, Galleria CONTINUA, Paris (2024)
Residency project
What happens when the body, the voice, and the psyche operate as both transmitter and receiver? What kind of reality emerges when we simultaneously experience and express? Lucky Pierre is an ongoing performance-based research project that merges poetry, sound, costume, and scenography to explore queer intimacy, confession, and transformation. At its core is a fictional persona ‘Lucky Pierre’ through which I channel diaristic reflections into live, sensorial performances. The project began with a series of spontaneous voice recordings, fragmented confessions drawn from everyday emotional states. Over time, this became a recursive process: lived experience fed the recordings, and the recordings began to shape my perception of life. The loop became a method, an emotional ecosystem echoing the Ouroboros: the serpent that consumes and regenerates itself. Lucky Pierre: a persona named after a term from gay slang, describing the man in the middle of a threesome, simultaneously penetrating and being penetrated. I use this figure not just for its erotic charge, but as a metaphor for duality and in-betweenness: submission and agency, subject and object, performer and witness. Through this lens, the performances become spaces where intimacy is both embodied and mythologized, where the line between reality and fiction blurs.
Bosnia and Herzegovina & Kosovo
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Kemil Bekteši, Bosnia and Herzegovina & Kosovo
“CookBook: How to Digest Secrets ”
Biography
Kemil Bekteši was born in 1997 in Belgrade. He lives and works in Sarajevo. He is a Bosnian/Kosovar visual artist of Gorani origin who’s work explores food and migration. His artistic practice spans various media, including food, installation and sculpture, often focusing on themes of identity, geopolitics, and cultural memory through his personal history marked by borders and migration. Kemil’s work has been presented in numerous institutions including The National Gallery of Kosovo (2025), RU House, NYC (2025), Die neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst, Germany (2024), Historical Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina (2022), The National Gallery of Bosnia and Herzegovina (2020).
Residency project
The project Cookbook: How to Digest Secrets explores the erasure of Albania’s turbulent communist past, particularly its end, when the regime used a bakery mixer to secretly destroy thousands of documents by kneading secret documents into dough. This conceptual cookbook aims to restore destroyed and secret narratives, collected with the help of local families, historians and anthropologists, and explores themes of scarcity, class division and resilience, illustrating how bread served as a symbol of survival and cultural identity amidst repression.
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Kosovo
Learn moreLumturie Krasniqi, Kosovo
“The Snake Above the Hill ”
Biography
Lumturie Krasniqi was born in 1997, in Prishtina, Kosovo. Lives and works in Prishtina. In her work, she delves into aspects often overlooked in contemporary life, aiming to raise existential questions. Her artistic approach, entwined with connections, separations, and the interplay of opposites, unites the spiritual and emotional, reflecting on the relationships between soul and matter, fear and love, humanity and nature, human connections and parallel realities. Her work has been presented in numerous institutions including Galleria Continua (France, 2025); Manifesta 14 (Kosovo, 2022); Museum of Contemporary Art (North Macedonia, 2023); Kulturpunkt (Switzerland, 2024); and Gallery of the Faculty of Arts (Kosovo, 2019).
Residency project
The Snake Above the Hill is an ongoing painting cycle that began in 2023 in Prishtina. Initially inspired by a rare Albanian folktale about a snake with hair, a story passed down orally by her grandmother, the project has evolved beyond the myth itself. Krasniqi approaches the tale not as a subject to depict, but as an entry point into exploring broader questions of memory, transformation, and the duality within human experience. During her residency at Villa 31, she will develop a new chapter of the series, creating paintings that reflect on the tension between visibility and invisibility, sacredness and violence, the body and its shadow. Through research, encounters, and conversations in Tirana, she aims to uncover how cultural memory and personal myth intertwine. The Snake Above the Hill continues to expand as a multifaceted investigation into forms of appearance, disappearance, return, and displacement, giving shape to beings that exist at the thresholds of myth, reality, and memory.
Bangladesh
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Palash Bhattacharjee, Bangladesh
“The Unfolding Story”
Biography
Palash Bhattacharjee was born in 1983, in Chittagong, Bangladesh. He lives and works in Chittagong, Bangladesh. Palash invests primarily in video installations, alongside digital collage, performance, photographs, and a small collection of objects, with nuanced imagery, often leaning toward the abstract and the absurd, as he aims to reconfigure his social self from both an actor’s and an observer’s viewpoint. His works have been exhibited, including at SOAS Gallery, London, UK, 2025; Warehouse421, Abu Dhabi, UAE, 2022; Colomboscope, Colombo, Sri Lanka, 2022; Hong-Gah Museum, Taipei, Taiwan, 2020; and Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh, 2012-2020.
Residency project
The first step of this residency programme will be to explore how I can delve deeper into Albanian culture and map a spatial thread through my own gaze. My roots, in many ways, resemble the Albanian experience, particularly in how resilience is forged through war, resistance, and the struggle for identity. In my project, I aim to develop a series of video and collage works centred on the history of the Balkan region, including Albania, and its current forms of local socio-aesthetic practices that resonate with my own socio-cultural and historical background. Through my interaction with local communities within a new imaginary, I intend to collect narratives from Tiranë that foreground the active role of collective memory as a vehicle for living political history.
China
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Yao Qingmei, China
“The Dream Castle – Lucid Dream Experimentation at Vila 31.”
Biography
Yao Qingmei (born in 1982 in Zhejiang) currently lives and works in Paris. Her practice focuses primarily on performance, video and related installation, incorporating elements of scenography, costumes, texts, lectures, games, sound poetry, and contemporary choreography. By intervening in specific spaces, she disrupts established rules, explores the symbols of everyday life, and examines how bodies nurtured by these symbols gain or lose power, breaking the boundaries between performance and its setting. Yao Qingmei’s work has been presented in numerous institutions including Centre Pompidou (France, 2024), West Bund Museum (China, 2023), Whitechapel Gallery (UK, 2020), Haus der Kunst in Munich (Germany, 2017), Palais de Tokyo (France, 2014).
Residency project
The Dream Castle is an immersive exploration of dreaming as a poetic, political, and corporeal act within the former private space of dictator Enver Hoxha in Tirana. Inspired by Albanian writer Ismail Kadare’s novel The Palace of Dreams, the project takes the form of a physical experience that transforms Vila 31 into a dream theater. These experiences will lead to the creation of a video performance blending documentary and fiction, real gestures and lucid dreams, until all distinctions dissolve. Through sleep experiments conducted by lucid dreamers, local mediums, and myself, lucid dreaming becomes a performative practice—an inner theater activated by sleeping bodies
Second session - from May to July
France
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Arthur Gillet, France
Misunderstanding
Biography
Arthur Gillet (b. 1986) grew up in the suburbs of Rennes in a deaf and neuroatypical family, marginalized by limited access to language and employment. A graduate with honors from the École des Beaux-Arts in Rennes (2011), he explores the limits of systematized norms in relationships, labor, and language through design, writing, and performance.
Alongside this critical approach, Gillet’s engagement with painting and performance is rooted in an intimate and lifelong relationship with images. From childhood onward, he developed visual and performative strategies to navigate an environment structured by invisible forces from the industrial era—electricity, sound waves, and unspoken social norms—that induced paranoia and psychosis and were present yet inaccessible within his family context. His work responds to this sensory and symbolic imbalance by making visible what is usually unheard, unseen, or taken for granted.
Through figuration, narration, and collective performance, Gillet challenges dominant hearing-centered aesthetics and values.
Residency project
Arthur Gillet is currently developing an artistic project centered on the concept of “umbilical language”—a form of communication that emerges between deaf parents and their hearing children beyond spoken language. Drawing on his experience as a CODA (Child of Deaf Adults), the project explores non-verbal, sensory, emotional, and therapeutic dimensions of early communication.
The project proposes that early vocalization can be understood as a transitional process: a form of weaning that replaces a pre-linguistic, embodied bond with an abstract and dematerialized mode of communication. Gillet articulates this shift through a technological metaphor, comparing it to the transition from a material, wired connection (Ethernet) to invisible, wireless communication (Wi-Fi). In this analogy, the loss of direct, embodied transmission parallels the symbolic rupture of an “umbilical cord” to language—a rupture that CODA children experience differently due to the absence of a shared spoken language with their parents.
Research on CODA infancy suggests that hearing children of deaf parents may experience prolonged silence in early development. Rather than framing this as a deficit, Gillet’s project reclaims it as a space of alternative knowledge and sensitivity. He examines how contemporary technologies—such as devices that translate sound into visual or tactile stimuli—can compensate for these early ruptures, while also raising questions about mediation, autonomy, and control.
The project further reflects on the paradoxical position of deaf people and CODAs within hearing societies: their relationship to knowledge—particularly medical knowledge—often requires active, conscious engagement, as evidenced by forms of activism and self-advocacy. By contrast, hearing societies tend to naturalize a passive relationship to knowledge—comparable to a form of “Wi-Fi chatting”—under the myth of meritocracy, thereby obscuring the structural conditions that shape access to information and resources. Drawing on recent sociological research, the work connects linguistic exclusion to broader class dynamics, emphasizing how family environment and social milieu continue to shape access to power and future social status.
Through performance, video, installation, painting, and relational practices, the project addresses themes of inverted parenthood, isolation, linguistic rupture, and the historical stigmatization of sign languages. During the residency in Albania, Gillet will expand this research through archival investigation and collaborations with local deaf associations, grounding the project in specific historical, cultural, and political contexts.
Albania
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Elian Stefa, Albania
"Next Generation Concrete Mushrooms"
Biography
Elian Stefa (b. 1985) is a spatial practitioner, curator, and experimental filmmaker working between Lisbon and Vlora. He is currently pursuing a PhD at Iscte– University Institute of Lisbon, researching curatorial and transdisciplinary spatial practices as tools for territorial transformation. In 2019, he founded Galeria e Bregdetit, an independent project space and residency on the Albanian Riviera addressing rapid touristification through site-specific artistic research. His projects include Concrete Mushrooms (Venice Architecture Biennale 2012), Off Season Tourism Agency (Manifesta 14), and Artileria Sazan. He has collaborated with institutions such as the Lisbon Triennale, Istanbul Design Biennial, and Harvard GSD.
Residency project
"Next Generation Concrete Mushrooms" is a spiritual successor to the 2009–2012 Concrete Mushrooms project, revisiting Albania’ bunkerization and debunkerization processes over the past decade. The project explores the instrumentalization of concrete, the persistence of bunker mentality, and the legacy of isolationist practices rooted in the monist system. While most bunkers were physically erased after 2013, their psychological imprint remains embedded in society and landscape. Through an experimental documentary and researchbased approach, the project examines how new forms of concrete reflect emerging geopolitical orders, revealing how domination and control continue to be materially and symbolically reconstructed rather than dismantled.
United Arab Emirates
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Hashel Al Lamki, United Arab Emirates
"Drift"
Biography
Hashel Al Lamki was born in 1986 in Al Ain, United Arab Emirates. He lives and works in Abu Dhabi. His multidisciplinary practice explores the intersections of nature, urbanism, and identity through painting, sculpture, and installation, reflecting on rapid transformations in the Arabian Peninsula. Al Lamki’s work has been presented in numerous institutions including his survey exhibition Maqam (Manarat Al Saadiyat, 2023) explored themes of belonging, memory, and environmental stewardship through immersive installations. He has exhibited internationally at major platforms including the Lyon Biennale, Gwangju Biennale, Bamako Encounters, Abu Dhabi Public Art Biennial, Sharjah Biennial, and Biennale Jogja.
Residency project
Explores the geological and political biography of Hafit mountain in Al Ain, United Arab Emirates. Rising from the desert like, it was formed from ancient seabeds of limestone and marl, lifted and bent when the Arabian Plate pressed against Eurasia, creating an isolated ridge adrift from the Hajar Mountains’ spine. Its layers record stories of collision, erosion, and time — movements far beyond a human lifespan. Today, Hafit lies between the United Arab Emirates and Oman, divided by a border drawn and shaped by 20th-century treaty-making and British surveying, yet sharing the same winds, stones, and fossils. It bridges deep prehistory — from the Eocene to Miocene eras — with modern identity and environmental challenges. A frontier Hafit also guards Bronze Age tombs that echo the earliest stories of that land. Through this research and residency, Drift imagines a reunion — geological, emotional, and political — where tectonic plates, history, and imagination meet again, unfolding as a performative play
France
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Rémi Lécussan, France
"Alyssum Wall: Alchemy of Repair and Extraction"
Biography
Rémi Lécussan was born in 1997 in France. He lives and works in Marseille. His practice explores the porous territories where non-human life, humans, and machines co-constitute each other, creating hybrid assemblages that reveal both violence and poetry in their entanglements. Lécussan's work has been presented in institutions including Songshan Lake Boxes Art Museum, China (2025, forthcoming first international solo exhibition); Glassbox Sud, France (2023); Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles, France (2025); and Villa Belleville, France (2024). He is a recipient of the 2025-2026 Post-Master Grant in Artificial Intelligence from ENSP, Arles, and completed a residency at Artagon, Marseille (2025).
Residency project
This project explores Alyssum murale, a yellow-flowering plant that grows on former industrial sites in Albania and extracts nickel from polluted soils. The plant performs an alchemy where ecological repair becomes simultaneously the production of raw materials for our technologies, yielding nearly 200 kg of nickel per hectare for battery production. The investigation will materialize the entanglements where care and extraction intertwine. Through field research at Albanian sites and experimentation with extraction processes and sculptural possibilities, the project will create hybrid assemblages combining living plants, treated forms, and technological elements. This work interrogates multiple temporalities that characterize repair processes, revealing how plant, metal, soil, and human practices compose new forms of assemblage. The project explores how matter carries the history of its transformations; from industrial contamination through biological cycles to future batteries, destabilizing separations between living and artificial, staying with the trouble.
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Lebanon
Learn moreVartan Avakian, Lebanon
"Treasure Maps for Haunting Landscapes"
Biography
The artist’s work explores memory, history, materiality, and erasure through diverse media, treating history as a layered sedimentation of traces and remains. Grounded in the belief that data assumes sculptural form, the practice excavates and transforms these layers into new configurations, positioning objects as portals between past and future imaginaries. As a board member of the Arab Image Foundation, the artist advocates for a tactile, experiential approach to preservation that challenges the primacy of digitization. Viewing data as stains, scratches, and inscriptions embedded over time, the work spans photography, drawing, sculpture, film, and archival research, engaging both visible and intangible imprints of memory and emotion.
Residency project
Treasure Maps for Haunting Landscapes examines how economic collapse revives speculative myths rooted in historical trauma. Amid global financial instability, countries such as Greece, Chile, Turkey, and Lebanon have faced debt crises and currency devaluations that generate desperation and fringe solutions. In Turkey, this has included the resurgence of myths surrounding Armenian gold allegedly buried during the genocide—narratives that reflect not only economic anxiety but also enduring denial and dispossession.The project focuses on treasure maps said to guide seekers to valuables hidden by Armenian families during forced deportations. Circulating through antique shops, private collections, and fringe online platforms, these maps embody hope and despair, secrecy and revelation. Their reappearance during economic downturns exposes unresolved legacies of violence and a fixation on Armenian wealth without acknowledgment of genocide. By transforming these maps into drawings and paintings, the project reclaims them as cultural artifacts— vessels of memory that confront buried histories and their persistent presence within contemporary landscapes.
Albania
Learn moreArchive of Absence: Ilir Tsouko & Elidor Mehilli, Albania
"Shadows of Power"
Ilir Tsouko, Albania
Biography
Ilir Tsouko was born in Albania in 1990, and raised in Athens, Greece. He divides his time between Berlin, Tirana, and Athens. A visual storyteller working across photography, film, and installation, he explores questions of identity, migration, and memory. His projects have been supported and exhibited by institutions like Goethe- Institut Athens, the Onassis Stegi Foundation, and the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, and featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, DIE ZEIT Magazin, ARTE, and ZDF. Recent works include the documentary film “Albgreko,” screened at major international film festivals, and the exhibition “Beyond Destruction,” presented at the Goethe-Institut in Athens. Nominated by Der Greif for the FUTURES European Photography Platform (2024), Ilir’s work is rooted in slow observation and reveals how power, displacement, and memory persist in the spaces people inhabit.
Elidor Mehilli, Albania
Biography
Elidor Mëhilli was born in Albania in 1981. He lives and works in New York. Trained as a historian at Princeton University, his multidisciplinary practice moves between research, writing, and visual experimentation. His work has explored Albania’s Cold War entanglements and the politics of the archive—how power leaves traces in documents, buildings, and memory. He is the author of the award-winning From Stalin to Mao: Albania and the Socialist World (Cornell) and has contributed to national programs at the Venice Biennale for both Art (2015) and Architecture (2025).His long-term project “An Infinite Archive”—a visual meditation on Tirana’s urban transformation—was recently exhibited at the Harriman Institute, Columbia University.
Residency project
“Shadows of Power” reimagines Vila 31 as a living, contested archive where ideology, intimacy, and memory collide. Conceived as an interdisciplinary dialogue between filmmaker Ilir Tsouko and historian Elidor Mëhilli, the project explores how authoritarianism inscribes itself in domestic space and collective consciousness. Drawing on Mëhilli’s decadeslong research—from the dictator’s personal archive and his wife’s redactions of documents to ghostwritten texts and unreliable memoirs that have shaped official memory—and Tsouko’s poetic visual language, the duo merges film, sound, and installation to create a sensorial archaeology of power. The villa is both subject and stage: a site where history was made and unmade, where spectral presences still linger. Through meticulous archival excavation, speculation, and public intervention, the collaboration invites visitors to inhabit the uneasy space between what history records and what it conceals.
Iran
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Tirdad Hashemi & Soufia Erfanian, Iran
"I Bloom Where You Hold Me"
Biographies
Tirdad Hashemi was born in 1991 in Tehran. Soufia Erfanian, was born in 1990 in Mashhad, Iran. They live and work between Paris and berlin. Their artistic practice, at times realized as a duo and at other times individually, within the realm of visual art is primarily centered on painting and drawing, exploring the intersections of oppressive power, cultural identity, and the condition of isolated bodies. As a queer couple, the work engages with both collective and individual trauma, breaking down past connections to form new relational structures. Their work has been presented in numerous institutions including including the 27th Biennale de Lyon France, 2024), Kindle Contemporary (Germany, 2024), Konschthal Esch (Luxembourg, 2024), UCCA Museum (China, 2024) and Musée d'art moderne et contemporain, MAMC+ (France, 2024).
Residency project
During the residency in Tirana, a new series of drawings will develop, building on their ongoing exploration of intimacy and relationality. These works will portray moments of care, softness, and vulnerability, subtle gestures of connection that often go unnoticed but carry deep emotional weight. Inspired by real relationships in their own lives and those of others in the diaspora, the drawings will investigate how queer affection persists and adapts under conditions of instability and fragmentation. Through this process, they aim to reflect both individual and collective experiences, highlighting the quiet resilience found in everyday acts of care and connection.
Third session - from September to November
Kosovo
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Ardit Hoxha, Albania
Muri i Gjallë / The Living Wall
Biography
Ardit Hoxha was born in 1993 in Prishtina, Kosovo, where he now lives and works. His work draws on the camera and the archive as instruments of documentation, cataloging, and historicizing, in order to create and present history anew. Hoxha’s work has been presented in numerous institutions, including the Tokyo Institute of Photography, the National Gallery of Kosovo, Te Tuhi, and RM Gallery in New Zealand.
Residency project
During his residency at Villa 31, Ardit Hoxha will research the production and distribution of Albanian films during the communist period, examining the venues where these films were screened. The project will draw on photography and moving image to explore the ruptures in space and time that occur on the screen and that continue to occur in Albania’s ideological transition. While in Tirana, Hoxha will conduct research at Kinostudio and Arkivi Qendror Shteteror i Filmit / the Central State Film Archives.
Kosovo
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Genc Kadriu, Albania
Presence of the Past — The Ghost of a Dead Flame
Biography
Genc Kadriu was born in 1975 in Mitrovica. Lives and works in Prishtina and Tirana. His practice explores the aesthetics of religiosity and the poetics of monumentality through photography, sculpture, and the written word. Genc Kadriu’s work has been presented in numerous institutions including National Gallery of Kosovo, 2023; Ludwig Museum, Hungary, 2016; Manifesta 14, Kosovo, 2022; Bazament, Tirana, 2022; MuseumsQuartier, Austria, 2024.
Residency project
Truths are contextual, and only through poetry and imagination can we reconnect with history’s lingering particulars. Vila 31 is a lieu de mémoire. Its garden and architecture preserve traces of past activity through their very being, embodying memory in ways no document could fully capture. Presence of the Past — The Ghost of the Dead Flame explores this difference between document and monument, enacting gestures that are both material and symbolic: tree planting and rose water extraction become acts that testify directly to human presence. Unlike written records or chronicles, the work speaks through doing, through objects and practices embedded in the site itself, the latter gradually becoming a living archive where contextual echoes are felt, enacted, and carried in the body of the space. The project extends into an artistic document booklet that gathers traces, texts, and images from the process.
Albania
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Lori Lako, Albania
Beneath the Blossoms, the Rot
Biography
Lori Lako (b. 1991, Pogradec, Albania) lives and works between Italy and Albania. Through her multidisciplinary practice examines the intersections of memory, history, and identity through the reactivation and recontextualization of archival materials and digital imagery. Lako’s work has been presented in numerous institutions, including the Civic Gallery, Shkodër, Albania (2025); Steiermärkische Landesbibliothek, Graz, Austria (2023); Residency Unlimited, New York, USA (2022); Museo Novecento, Florence, Italy (2020); Center for Contemporary Art Luigi Pecci, Prato, Italy (2017).
Residency project
"Beneath the Blossoms, the Rot”, is a moving image project that examines the psychological and political residue of authoritarianism as it endures through space, memory, and inherited symbols of power. Combining AI-generated reconstructions, archival materials from the Albanian National Film Archive, and new footage, the work revisits a childhood memory of the artist getting lost inside Enver Hoxha’s former summer villa in her hometown, Pogradec. The project excavates this moment of disorientation, compulsively eating apples in the orchard until sickness, then refusing to eat at a table of abundance. This seemingly mundane event becomes a metaphor for instinctive resistance and the persistence of power, often disguised as change. The child’s body emerges as an archive where historical trauma is absorbed, processed, rejected.
Argentina
Learn morePablo Méndez, Argentina
"Silent Glimmers — Encounters with Fireflies in the Post-Soviet Twilight"
Biography
Pablo Méndez was born in 1988 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Lives and works between Florianópolis (Brazil) and Paris (France). He is a FNRS–FrArts fellow (Belgium, 2025–27) and trained at the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie, Arles (2015), alongside independent training with artists and curators. Through installations, video and booklets, he explores what the world means for non-human species in wetlands, honoring specially the lives under extinction pressure. His work has been presented at Rencontres Internationales Paris–Berlin (France, 2024), documenta fifteen (Germany, 2022), Matadero (Spain, 2021), Centro Cultural Kirchner (Argentina, 2021–22), and the Bienal de la Imagen en Movimiento (Argentina, 2020).
Residency project
The project investigates the fragile insistence of firefly life within landscapes marked by socialist afterlives and industrial retreat in Albania. It enters zones of slowed history — rail corridors gone idle, factory peripheries overtaken by vegetation, rural margins where concrete and damp coexist — to attend to how these insects continue to pulse in the dark. Their light is not allegory or nostalgia but a situated relation, a minor choreography through which a species negotiates toxicity, distance, and time. Instead of interpreting or representing, the work composes encounters: walking, watching, lingering with the intermittent grammar of their signals. The aim is to register how low flickering life reorganizes perception — how attention, once decoupled from progress and spectacle, becomes a way of inhabiting ruins alongside other beings.
France
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Paul Heintz, France
"Off Call"
Biography
Paul Heintz is an artist and filmmaker whose practice encompasses films, sound creations, installations, and editions, presented within the contexts of visual arts and cinema. His work is consistently rooted in documentary approaches, whether through encounters with individuals or communities, or through the discovery and reinterpretation of archival materials, which he frames from an artistic and critical perspective to explore questions of normativity and authority. Heintz has long been engaged with issues surrounding transformations in the world of work. His projects frequently address themes such as fatigue and depression in professional contexts, the impact of new management techniques, and the isolation and loneliness experienced by workers in a globalized environment. Many of these works are collective in nature, conceived in collaboration with workers, and are presented in art spaces, museums, social centers, and film festivals.
Residency project
The Off call project proposes an artistic reflection on the professions of speech and delocalized services. It takes as its starting point meetings and discussions with employees of offshore call center based in Tirana, and proposes a filmic and collective work. Paul Heintz’s residency project investigates the precarious and often invisible labor of call center operators in Tirana, focusing on the intersection of voice, identity, and working conditions. Building on his long-standing interest in transformations in the world of work, Heintz will collaborate with local tele-operators to document their experiences, exploring how scripted labor, borrowed identities, and linguistic constraints affect both professional and personal life. Through interviews, encounters, and performative approaches, Heintz plans to create a filmed theatrical piece inspired by Albanian myths and ancient theater, where operators may participate in dramatized sequences. The project will incorporate the creation of masks, referencing historical typologies, to reflect on the tension between anonymity, protection, and self-expression. By merging documentary research with performance and installation, the work will highlight the human, social, and emotional dimensions of off-shored labor, giving voice to experiences that are rarely heard.
Kosovo
Learn moreVigan Nimani, Kosovo
"Who's House Is This"
Biography
Vigan Nimani was born in 1981 in Prishtina. He is a visual artist, musician and cultural worker based in Prishtina, Kosovo. Mainly working with painting, drawing and photography Nimani’s practice deals with the notion of memory and past from a nonnostalgic, progressive point of view. His work, which is developed through fragmentations and abstraction, invites the viewer to actively engage in the meaning-making process of the past, at present.
Residency project
This project is deeply connected to Albanian history it also utilises the unique opportunity to stay inside the Enver Hoxha’s house and explore the interior of this iconic building. I aim to create a new body of work that not only reflects my artistic vision but also contributes to the cultural and historical discourse surrounding this significant site. I am particularly drawn to the Hoxha’s house because of its complex history and cultural significance. The building serves as a reminder of Albania's past, a period marked by dictatorship and isolation. Through my residency, I aim to explore how these buildings, as physical remnants of the past, continue to shape the country's identity and collective memory. I am interested in investigating how they might evoke trauma, nostalgia, or reflection in those who experience them today. By documenting the Hoxha’s house through my paintings, I hope to contribute to a nuanced understanding of Albania's history and its ongoing impact on the present.
Greece
Learn moreYorgos Prinos & Stratis Vogiatzis, Greece
"Return"
Yorgos Prinos
Biography
Υorgos Prinos was born in 1977 in Athens, Greece. He lives and works in Athens. His work explores issues of power and violence at the intersection of human psychology and politics, often focusing on the human figure in urban space, using his own images alongside found footage from media and the internet. Prinos’ work has been presented in numerous institutions including Hot Wheels London (United Kingdom, 2024), GfZK Leipzig (Germany, 2023), National Museum of Contemporary Art – EMST (Greece, 2022), Athens Biennale (Greece, 2021), New Museum & DESTE Foundation (Greece, 2019).
Stratis Vogiatzis
Biography
Stratis Vogiatzis was born in 1978 in Chios island in Greece and lives and works in Athens. He navigates himself between anthropology, filmmaking, photography and writing. Ηis work is closely related to the posthuman or post anthropocentric discourse and at the heart of his practice lies polyvocality and collaborative modes of working. Stratis Vogiatzis’ work has been presented in numerous institutions including Athens Conservatorium (Greece, 2025), Goethe Institute Athens & National Bank of Greece Cultural Foundation (Greece 2024), Thessaloniki Photobiennale (Greece 2023), Momus-Museum Alex Mylona (Greece 2022), Multiplier Festival (Luxembourg 2021).
Residency project
The film “Return” explores the afterlives of dictatorship and the fragilities of collective memory in a city undergoing rapid transformation. The project, which engages with Albanian refugees who fled to Greece after the collapse of Hoxha’s regime and have since returned to live in the city of Tirana, is composed of three interwoven layers: archival documentation of Tirana during the regime, contemporary footage of the city, and the oral testimonies of those who fled and subsequently returned. We approach this work as a form of testimony that acknowledges our shared geography, its asymmetries, and the need to center voices that have largely been excluded from both Albanian and Greek national narratives. This inquiry is an act of political listening.
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The 2026 Selection Committee
Independent curator and essayist
Learn morePierre Bal-Blanc is an art critic and curator. Editor-in-chief of the magazine Bloc Notes (1998-2000), co-founder of the Design Mental agency, he directed the Centre d'art contemporain de Brétigny-sur-Orge (2003-2014).
Pierre Bal-Blanc was associate curator of Documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel. Resonating with the societal thought of Charles Fourier, he is developing the "Phalanstère Project", a series of in situ proposals that critically restructure the logics of labor accumulation.
The most important aspect of his curatorial work is "de-gentrification", inspired by the philosophical work of Pierre Klossowski.
Pierre Bal-Blanc's projects regularly address the paradoxes of perversion and transgression, of the living and the object, through the processes of industrialization and production.
Directors of Hamburger Bahnhof: National Gallery for Contemporary Art, Berlin
Learn moreTill Fellrath and Sam Bardaouil have been curators and co-directors of Hamburger Bahnhof: Berlin's Museum of Contemporary Art since 2008.
Together they founded the multidisciplinary curatorial platform Art Reoriented in Munich and New York.
They were curators of the 2022 Lyon Biennale, and curators of the French Pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale, as well as affiliated curators at Berlin's Gropius Bau until 2021.
Their exhibitions have been shown at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Gwangju and Busan art museums in South Korea, Tate Liverpool and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden.
Curator, author and director of Tirana Art Lab - Contemporary Art Center, Albania
Learn moreAdela Demetja is an Albanian curator born in Tirana.
She is the director of Tirana Art Lab - Center for Contemporary Art, which she founded in 2010.
As a freelance curator, she has organized numerous exhibitions internationally and with institutions such as Tirana's National Art Gallery, Kosovo's National Art Gallery, Berlin's Maxim Gorki Theater and Portland's Institute for Contemporary Research.
She curated the Albanian pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale, represented by Lumturi Blloshmi.
She is the founder and director of "Curating with Care", an alternative conservation training programme based in Tirana.
Curator, lecturer, educator. Director of ΕΜΣΤ | National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens.
Learn moreKaterina Gregos is a curator and writer. Since 2021, she has been director of the National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMΣT), in Athens.
For over 20 years, her curatorial work has explored the relationship between art, society and politics, with a particular focus on issues of democracy, human rights, economics, ecology, crises and changes in global production circuits. As an independent curator, she has organized Riga, Manifesta and Goteborg.
She has also curated three national pavilions at the Venice Biennale: Denmark (2011), Belgium (2015) and Croatia (2019).
This year, she is curator of the Greek pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale. She divides her time between Athens and Brussels.
Curator, Création Contemporaine et Prospective department, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris
Learn moreAlicia Knock has been a curator for contemporary creation at the Centre Pompidou since 2015.
Her work focuses on modern and contemporary art from Africa and Central Europe, with a particular emphasis on acquisitions and exhibitions.
In 2018, she created the "Cercle international Afrique" of the Friends of the Centre Pompidou.
She seeks to propose innovative, creative and forward-looking exhibition formats that question the museum of tomorrow from a decolonial perspective. Her work is also committed to giving greater visibility to women artists.
She has been commissioned to curate the Albanian pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale.
She has worked with numerous art institutions, including the Palais de Tokyo in Paris and MoMA PS1 in New York.
2025 Residents
First session - from January to March
Japan
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Amie Barouh , Japan
The Alchemist
Biography
Amie Barouh was born in 1993, in Tokyo, Japan. She lives and works between France and Romania. She creates an experimental documentary giving voice to those at the margin of society. Her films take the form of 'Film diary', between documentaries and visual essays, aim first to transmit an experience, lived as it is. Her subjective editing espouses her heartbeat, reconstructing the full complexity of documenting the world to which we do not belong. Amie Barouh’s work has been presented in numerous institutions including Villa Medici Film Festival (Italy, 2022), Biennale de la jeune creation (France, 2022), Emerige Revelations (France, 2022), FilMadrid Festival (Spain, 2019), and Vision du Réel Festival (Switzerland, 2019).
Residency project
Through “The Alchemist”, Amie Barouh wants to archive the resistance of marginalized people through magic tricks; keeping in mind concerns about social boundaries and respecting their cultural norms. Belief; faith, affects the perception we have. That is why she wants to work around magic, the art of manipulation of reality and belief. What you think is real, is not really real. The reality is not what you think. Magic as healing, magic as a political tool, magic as resistance, magic as making miracles, magic as an access to another way of thinking. Amie Barouh would like to combine fieldwork of meeting the different minority communities with her artistic explorations of video ; journaling and use of magic. In her work, she links the need for beliefs with the resilience of discriminated minorities.
Albania
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Armando Duçellari , Albania
overlapping remnants
Biography
Armando Duçellari, was born in 1990 in Durrës, Albania. He lives and works in Bremen, Germany. His artistic practice focuses on the contrast of the viewer’s reaction in the context of art and during the production of an artwork in public space. He works on the relationship between space and time through mediums based on time, like Photography, Stop-Motion Animation, Video and Performance.
Armando Duçellari’s work has been exhibited at Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst (Germany, 2021), Osthaus-Museum Hagen (Germany, 2017). He participated in residencies at Cité Internationale des Arts (France, 2022), and UNIDEE - Cittadellarte / Art House Shkodër (Italy / Albania, 2017).
Residency project
The project “overlapping remnants” aims to examine memory as a dynamic process that intertwines past perceptions with present realities, offering a deeper understanding of the continuous interplay between different eras. It explores the relationship between memory and reality through the personal experiences of a family member who worked at Vila 31 from 1974 to 1982.
By juxtaposing past and present, the project highlights the Vila 31 transformation over time and thereby aims to document and preserve individual memory by capturing detailed recollections and comparing them with the current state of the building. Personal remembrance together with present-day visuals, will offer viewers a comprehensive tour that tries to connect the gap between memory and reality.
Albania
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Arnilda Kyçyku, Albania
Tirana Preserves Culture and Tradition
Biography
Arnilda Kyçyku was born in 1997, in Albania. She lives and works in Tirana. Her painting works focuses on personal experiences and the reality that surrounds her, which will be showcased in her upcoming second solo exhibition at the same gallery in September.
Her work has been presented in several institutions, including Tirana Art Gallery, (Albania, 2023), Tirana International Contemporary Art Festival (Albania, 2023), Jordan Misja Art School Gallery (Albania, 2024), and Vlora Gallery (Albania, 2022). She is currently resident at the Tirana Art Gallery.
Residency project
The project “Tirana Preserves Culture and Tradition” aims to capture and celebrate the enduring cultural heritage and traditions of Tirana through a series of oil paintings. The project focuses on how Tirana has managed to keep its cultural identity intact despite the pressures of modernization. Paintings will showcase how the city blends its rich history and traditions with contemporary life. Special highlight will be given to persistence of traditional practices, clothing, and festivals within the modern urban landscape. By capturing these elements, artist aims to show how important they are in keeping the city’s identity alive. This project will provide a visual representation of how Tirana’s unique cultural past continues to coexist with its evolving present.
Italy
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Genny Petrotta, Italy
Hak (revenge)
Biography
Genny Petrotta was born in 1990, in Italy. She lives and works in Palermo. Her work centers on the poetic reinterpretation of history and minority narratives, with a particular focus on her italien arbëreshë cultural heritage. Favoring video installation and performance as her primary media, Petrotta employs a cinematic process of project construction, writing, and filming.
Her work has been exhibited in various institutions, including Fondazione Studio Rizoma (Italy, 2024), Autostrada Biennale, (Kosovo, 2023-2024), Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, (Italy, 2024), Postane, (Turkey, 2023) and Manifesta 12 (Italy, 2018). Since 2016, she has been a member of the artistic collective Il Pavone.
Residency project
"Hak (revenge)" project explores the complex history and social dynamics of the Burrnesha, socially recognized female-to-male cross-dressers from Albania and Kosovo. Using a multidisciplinary approach, the project engages the Burrnesha community through participatory methods, with Shakespeare's "Hamlet" serving as a poetic framework for dialogue and exploration. Genny Petrotta’s early fascination with the Burrnesha was sparked by discovering their role in the Kanun, a customary code that governs traditional Albanian norms.
As part of her identity research, she aims to reimagine "Hamlet" through their experiences, intertwining Shakespeare's narrative with the personal stories of the Burrnesha, which are often misrepresented by Western media.
France
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Marianne Marić, France
Monument body
Biography
Marianne Marić was born in 1982, in France. She lives and works between Paris and Strasbourg. She develops a transdisciplinary body of work in which she deconstructs stereotypes to exploit them and bend them to her will. Her photographic practice is a performative one – she inserts herself into the heart of the model, she photographs through premeditated tricks at the risk of crossing the barriers of her own intimacy.
Her work has been presented in numerous institutions including the Ostrava Art Center (Czech Republic, 2022), Moly-Sabata, Fondation Albert Gleizes (France, 2020), the Athens Biennale (Greece, 2018), the National Gallery (Bosnia and Herzegovina, 2018), the Museum of Contemporary Art Vojvodina (Serbia, 2014), and the Centre d’Art Contemporain de Brétigny-sur-Orge (France, 2009).
Residency project
“Monument Body” project is a continuation of the research Marianne Marić began in 2012 on the Balkans, in collaboration with scientists, researchers and artists.
Her work focuses on the complex past of Albania, a country marked by a rich and tumultuous history. She is particularly interested in the deep link between Albania and the History of Photography, notably through the legacy of the Marubi family, who played an essential role in the visual documentation of the country. The aim of this project is to revisit and reinterpret the history of Albania through a new series of photographs. These images will highlight two essential aspects: on a hand, the statues (the ‘memory of stone’) and monuments that embody the country's official and monumental history, and on the other, the history of women (the ‘memory of flesh’), which represents the human and personal dimension within local landscapes.
Ukraine
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Stanislava Pinchuk, Ukraine
Post Cards
Biography
Stanislava Pinchuk was born in 1988, in Kharkiv, Ukraine. She lives and works in Sarajevo. Her work is primarily occupied with data-mapping conflict in landscape, as well as the place of linguistic translation in historic narrative. She works with architecture, large-scale installation, sculpture, film & photography.
Stanislava Pinchuk’s work has been showcased in great shows including the ACMI (Australia, 2024), the HE Museum (China, 2022-2023) and the 14th Manifesta Biennale (Kosovo, 2022). She also produced artworks for several commissions, including a permanent mural installation in London, in 2022.
Residency project
The proposed works will take the place of a suite of photographs and performances, undertaken within the loaded context of Enver Xoxha’s Vila. Disseminated as post-cards, the images which document these actions aim to interrogate exactly what the idea of ‘post-communism’ and specifically, what the ‘post-communist body’ may mean.
We often speak of a ‘post-colonialism’ or a ‘post-communism’ - but how exactly does it ‘leave’? And at what exact moment does it ‘leave’? The following works are inspired by 17th Century Slavic burials of the suspected vampiric un-dead, theories of hypnosis, anti-occupationist resistance & communist-era redactions of postal communications.
Albania
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Gerta Xhaferaj, Albania
Asylum of the Silent Recall
Biography
Gerta Xhaferaj was born in 1993 in Fier, Albania. She lives and works between Tirana and Basel. Employing both spontaneity and methodology, her artistic focus lies in a historical and documentary style, seeking profound engagement with specific realities to extract intense aesthetic experiences such as: localities, dynamic of urban landscape, popular culture, transformation of city and self and social justice.
Gerta Xhaferaj’s work has been presented in numerous institutions including Kunsthaus Baselland (Switzerland, 2024), ΜΙΕΤ Goethe intitute (Greece, 2024), Galeria e Bregdetit (Albania, 2024), Larnaca Biennale (Cyprus, 2023), Manifesta Biennial 14 (Kosovo, 2022).
Residency project
"Asylum of the Silent Recall" extends research begun two years ago when Gerta Xhaferaj relocated to a new country, distancing from her family. The project incorporates 47 hours of childhood video footage, archival documents, and interviews, capturing moments like family dinners, weddings, and fireworks. The footage features recurring floral images—inserted by artist’s father—who censored blurry scenes with still-life roses, possibly reflecting his experiences during Albania's turbulent transition.
The project explores themes of memory, identity, and censorship, linking Albania's communist past with its democratic present. It includes a study of the dictator's villa, now a cultural space, and the network of bunkers symbolizing the era's paranoia and protectionism. This exploration will continue through archival research and architectural plans, aiming to reveal deeper narratives and connections within Tirana's evolving landscape.
Second session - from May to July
Bangladesh
Learn moreGidree Bawlee, Bangladesh
Imagined Land
Biography
Gidree Bawlee Foundation of Arts, founded in 2001 by Kamruzzaman Shadhin and now jointly run with Salma Jamal Moushum, is based in Balia village, Thakurgaon, Bangladesh. As a community-based arts collective, it engages diverse communities in creative programs and research, addressing local history, culture, and the environment. The collective thrives on collaboration, blending local traditions with global perspectives through participatory, multidisciplinary practices. Their social practice emphasizes shared connections and balance in the artistic process. Gidree Bawlee’s projects have been featured at major venues, including the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, UK (2024), Kochi-Muziris Biennale, India (2022–2023), Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh (2020, 2023), Asia Pacific Triennial, Australia (2021), and Museo Madre, (Italy, 2021).
Residency project
“Imagined Land” explores how the movement of people across borders intersects with the transmission and transformation of cultural memory, interrogating notions of belonging and identity as fluid and contingent constructs. The project examines the ways in which practices of cultural preservation and adaptation function within the context of migration, engaging with the lived experiences of individuals as they navigate shifting social and spatial terrains. Through archival research and critical reflection, “Imagined Land” investigates the interplay between collective memory and individual narratives, considering how these elements reshape and reconstitute notions of selfhood and community in diasporic contexts.
Albania, France
Learn moreErdiola Mustafaj, Albania
Extended Cham dialect
Biography
Erdiola Mustafaj was born in 1992 in Elbasan, Albania. She lives and works between Paris and Albania. Her artwork explores the relationship between time, language and technical image - with a focus on photography. Recently working with sound installations and video, she appropriates personal archives and collective memories to discuss the intellectual and political history of her country.
Erdiola Mustafaj’s work has been presented in numerous institutions including Zeta Contemporary Art Center (Albania, 2024), “Rencontres de la jeune photographie internationale” (France, 2022 / China 2024), Fondazione Stelline (Italy, 2019) and Shkodra Arthouse and Marubi Museum (Albania, 2019).
Anne Bourrassé, France
Biography
Anne Bourrassé was born in 1991, in France. She lives and works in Paris. She is an independent curator and writer at the crossroad of the visual arts and the humanities. She was director of exhibitions and artists’ studios at Le Consulat Voltaire cultural center in Paris (2021-2023). In 2019, she co-founded the association Contemporaines to combat gender inequalities in contemporary art. She has produced exhibitions, published texts and completed residencies for cultural institutions and Galleries including Le Manège (Sénégal, 2023); The Polygon (Canada, 2023); Jousse Entreprise (France, 2024); Three Shadows Photography Art Center (Chine, 2021).
Residency project
The residency project aims to extend the heritage of the language and its complex history through contemporary visual, audio and written interpretations. This project is based on the way in which evolutions and disappearances within the language are the main witnesses to the individual and collective history, particularly for the Albanian Cham minority. This research will be conducted in collaboration with the typography department of the Academy of fine arts in Tirana and the Academy of Albanological Studies / “Qendra e Studimeve Albanologjike”. They’ll collect oral narratives from south Albania villages, then focusing on the creation of a video work that would consist of the recording of a three-voice performance combining different forms of language.
Romania, Switzerland
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Mona Vatamanu & Florin Tudor, Romania, Switzerland
Between Vernacular and Utopia
Biography
Artists Mona Vatamanu and Florin Tudor artists have worked together since 2000. Mona Vatamanu was born in 1968, in Constanta, Roumania, and Florin Tudor was born in 1974, in Geneva. They work and live in Bucuresti.
« The artists do not impose on the viewer any preconceived social framework. Their practice consists of attentive observation and taking notice of material elements of reality. The work of the artists with such material can be a starting point for questioning social relations, economic changes, political conflicts. » (Joanna Sokolowska)
Mona Vatamanu and Florin Tudor work has been presented in numerous institutions including KADIST (USA, 2024), GfZK Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig (Gerrmany, 2018), Centre Pompidou (France, 2014), 5th Berlin Biennial, KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Gerrmany, 2008) and 52nd Venice Biennial (Italy, 2007).
Residency project
During the period of the residency, Mona Vatamanu & Florin Tudor will research the recent history, architecture and vernacular urbanism of Tirana. The city’s multilayered constructed space is of particular interest: architecture projects - post-socialist, as well socialist and fascist and their relation with utopian visions. In the same time some other research paths will focus on a common strata of Albanian and Romanian culture and language, lines of dialogue that may be established between the history and material culture (textiles, photography). Artists plan to expand their research by connecting with local architects, urbanists and as well to contact and research in the photographic archive of the Marubi National Museum of Photography, Shkoder.
Germany
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Romana Schmalisch & Robert Schlicht, Germany
My uncle
Biography
Romana Schmalisch was born in 1974, in Berlin. She lives and works in Berlin. Since 2010, she has collaborated with artist and filmmaker Robert Schlicht, born in 1975, in Berlin. They work on projects at the interface of film and theory to investigate how historical processes and societal structures may be represented in film. The theme of labour in capitalist societies is a focal point in their films, exhibitions and lecture series. Their works have been presented in numerous institutions including n.b.k. (Germany, 2024), Frac Sud (France, 2023), CCCOD (France, 2021 - 2022), 69. Berlinale (Germany, 2018), HKW (Germany, 2018 - 2019).
Residency project
“My Uncle” is a research project based on a personal story. It takes an encounter between people from different political systems as a case study to examine the broader questions of the (self)presentation and perception of societies, of their representability. Romana Schmalisch’s uncle was a member of the KPD/ML (Communist Party of Germany/Marxists-Leninists), one of the many ‘K-groups’ in West-Germany that had proliferated in the wake of 1968. Visiting Albania served as a projection screen for the revolutionary aspirations of these young West-Germans – so much so that they allowed themselves to only see what they wanted to see – consciously or not. For the Albanian officials, the credulous enthusiasm of their visitors provided them with an opportunity to put on display, to enact an image of their society as they wanted it to be seen, probably also as they would have wanted it to be.
Albania
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Vangjush Vellahu, Albania
Departing to find the language – returning to preserve the silence
Biography
Vangjush Vellahu was born in 1987 in Pogradec, Albania. He lives and works between Tirana and Berlin. Visual artist working with video, he was initially trained in traditional and digital graphics. He focuses on storytelling specific to particular communities. He uses travels to collect and tell stories that intertwine urban histories of entities that, from an ideological and political standpoint, remain on the margins of recognition. His work has been presented in numerous institutions and exhibitions, including at ZK/U (Germany, 2024), Manifesta Biennial (Kosovo, 2022), Times Art Center (Germany, 2021), Hamburger Bahnhof (Germany, 2018), and the National Gallery of Prague (Czech Republic, 2016).
Residency project
Vangjush Vellahu’s project explore the poetics and politics of departure, transition, and return. This research examine the physical and psychological attributes of land, water, and demarcation lines within Albania and its proximity, which are continuously being altered by a Eurocentric narrative. This project aims to visually articulate a personal journey that navigates through horizontal and vertical policies of territoriality, without fully resonating with either the departure from one place or the arrival at another. During the residency, he will outline a series of works across various formats and mediums, including writings, videos, and cartographies, to further explore the interplay of lines that cut through and cut across. This project will also act as an epilogue to Vangjush Vellahu’s earlier work and journey, as he departs and returns through so-called “geographical peripheries” and “marginal borders”.
Germany
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Franziska Von Stenglin, Germany
Breaking Boundaries: Xhanfise Keko's Legacy as a Female Director in Soviet-Era Albania
Biography
Franziska von Stenglin was born in 1984, in Munich. She lives and works in Berlin. Artist and filmmaker, she grew up in the Czech Republic, Senegal, India and Germany. In her work she links aspects of her own biography with local myths, people and their stories who she encounters on her travels and artist residencies. Her first feature-length film "The Dust Of Modern Life" had its world premiere at FID (France, 2021) and was screened at DOK (Germany), at CPH Dox (Denmark), and the ICA (United Kingdom), amongst others. The piece “Baħar Biss” was commissioned by the Malta Biennale (Malta, 2024).
Residency project
Franziska von Stenglin’s residency project will focus on the groundbreaking work of Xhanfise Keko, a notable female director who created influential children's films during Albania's Soviet era. Despite facing heavy censorship and gender biases, Keko embedded subversive messages in her work, making her a significant figure in Albanian cinema. Franziska von Stenglin’s previous projects have explored cultural memory and the interplay between tradition and modernity, resonating with Keko's nuanced storytelling under a restrictive regime. Her aim is to illuminate the power of cinema in challenging societal values and exploring gender dynamics.
Italy
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Kairo Urovi, Italy
Stray dog
Biography
Kairo Urovi was born in 2000, in Fano, Italia. He/They live and work in London. Kairo Urovi’s photographic artwork deals with trans masculinity and queer identity. Their work has been presented in institutions such as Paris Photo art fair (France, 2023), Tirana Art Lab (Albania, 2023) and Burgh House London (United Kingdom, 2021).
Residency project
“Stray Dog” is an ongoing project that finds the artist journeying back to their home country Albania. 11 years after his last visit and 3 years after a gender transition, “Stray Dog” explores a now unfamiliar land where complex emotions of displacement and isolation are amplified. Moving away from traditional documentary work, “Stray Dog” uses humour and playfulness to narrate the artist’s experience of being transgender within Albanian society.
Using his own body, Kairo Urovi disrupts the frame: there are frictions between wanting to be seen and hiding, between empty spaces and ones he inhabits and claims as his own. Whether in the landscapes or self-portraiture, there is an element of wanting to disturb the environment by placing himself within it.
Third session - from September to November
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Canada, Iran
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Pejvak – Felix Kalmenson & Rouzbeh Akhbari, Canada & Iran
The Wire Strangles
Biography
Pejvak is a collective formed in 2014 by Felix Kalmenson and Rouzbeh Akhbari. Felix Kalmenson was born in 1987 in Saint Petersburg. He lives and works in Tbilisi, Georgia. Rouzbeh Akhbari was born in 1992 in Tehran. He lives and works in Lisbon. Through their multifaceted and intuitive approach to research and life, they find themselves intertwined with collaborators, histories, and geographies that resonate with their own.
Their works has been exhibited in institutions including MAC VAL (France, 2023), Van Abbemuseum (Netherlands, 2022), M HKA (Belgium, 2021) and Si Shang Art Museum (China, 2023). They won the Prix George at Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur (Switzerland, 2020).
Residency project
“The Wire Strangles” is an expansive research-based project which spans the botanic, oceanographic and terrestrial distance between Malaysia, Oman and Albania through the planetary-scale infrastructures of submarine telecommunications cables. During the residency a new major artist moving image work will be developed, in collaboration with local and international researchers, artists, authors and musicians. The work will develop from almost a decade of research conducted by Pejvak, building on an archive of footage shot since 2017 in Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, UK and Oman, coupled with new footage and works to be developed in Tirana and Albania more broadly.
Bosnia and Herzegovina
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Damir Avdagic, Bosnia and Herzegovina
Prevodenje (Përkthimi, Translation)
Biography
Damir Avdagic was born in 1987, in Banja Luka, Bosnia & Hercegovina. He lives and works between Oslo and Athens. Damir Avdagic’s practice explores themes of historical memory and identity through text, performance and video. As the conflict in Ex-Yugoslavia (1991-1995) is central in his family history, he uses this event as an entry point to think through shifting political systems, migration and the relationship between generations.
Avdagic’s work has been presented in numerous institutions including The Young Artists’ Society (Norway, 2024), Inside Out Art Museum (China, 2024), CAC Gallery (USA, 2024), Whitechapel Gallery (United Kingdom, 2023) and KRAK Center for Contemporary Culture (Bosnia and Herzegovina, 2021).
Residency project
In Damir Avdagic´s work, transgenerational transmission is captured through live translation performed between members of different generations belongiong to the Yugoslav diaspora. Through the slips, stutters and gestures that arise from the task of translating, something appears that lies beyond the spoken message - a surplus that exceeds the translation and the translator in a painful and poetic way. During his residency, Avdagic will develop a performance with a mother and her now grown child from an Ex-Yugoslav family that resettled in Tirana during the 90s, in which the child will listen to and simultaneously translate the mother´s testimony from BCS (Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian) to Albanian. Avdagic will thereby continue his interrogation into the conditions for representing and mediating the denied or repressed trauma caused by war and displacement, but will challenge his working method and form by experimenting with the live setting, in contrast to previous edited video work.
Germany
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Anna Ehrenstein, Germany
To Own a Space
Biography
Anna Ehrenstein was born in 1993, in Germany. She lives and works between Berlin and Tirana. She’s an artist working collaboratively across sculptural and virtual installation, moving image and post-photographic media. She was born a migrant denied asylum and grew up between Germany and Albania.
Anna Ehrenstein received the C/O Berlin Talent Award in 2020. Her work has been presented in numerous institutions including "Lagos Biennale," (Nigeria, 2024), Staatsgalerie Saarbrücken (Germany, 2022), and C/O Berlin, (Germany, 2021).
Residency project
“To Own a Space” transforms Enver Hoxha’s villa into a site of reflection and empowerment through collaborative art making and social exchange. Drawing on her own family's history in conversation with the local community, Anna Ehrenstein's work delves deeply into generational trauma, memory, and resilience. Utilizing AI for media analysis and creation, the project explore how trauma is passed down through generations while highlighting resilience, healing, and cultural continuity. In collaboration with Albanian craftsmen and historians, Anna Ehrenstein will engage in social practice workshops with locals of all generations and create a new body of sculptural and video works.
Albania
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Olson Lamaj, Albania
HEAVY HERO
Biography
Olson Lamaj was born in 1985, in Tirana. He lives and works in Tirana. Olson Lamaj’s artwork explores social and political themes, focusing on both contemporary Albanian life and universal systems of meaning. His projects highlight the semiotic saturation and mystical qualities of objects and images tied to political ideologies. His artworks serve as a collective mythography of the present, fostering the creation of new myths.
His work has been shown in numerous institutions and galleries, including Zeta Gallery (Albania, 2023), Tallin Art Hall (Estonia, 2022), Bazamant Art Space (Albania, 2019), Die Kunsthalle Exnergasse im WUK (Austria, 2019), Ludwig Museum Budapest (Hungary, 2016).
Residency project
His residency project at Vila 31 will explore the complex legacy of Aleksandër Kondo, an Albanian weightlifter who defied the structures of the communist regime in the 1980s. Through a multidisciplinary approach of photography, video, installation art and historical research, he aims to unravel the intricate dynamics of heroism and rebellion. By examining Kondo's transformation from a celebrated national figure to a symbol of resistance, this project will challenge conventional narratives around hero worship. Through this lens, he seeks to question how society constructs and deconstructs their heroes, offering a critical reflection on the intersections of sports, politics, and identity.
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United States
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Adriana Ramic , United States
Let it see you only in the shape of your shadows / walking bumblebees think faster
Biography
Adriana Ramić was born in 1989, in Chicago. She lives and works in Berlin.
Her work spans installation, video, text, sculpture, drawing, and software, exploring the tenuous pathos and interiorities among earthly and machinic beings. Through enigmatic vignettes of perception, she investigates the sensitivities of existence and comprehension in both personal and abstracted forms.
Adriana Ramić’s work has been presented in numerous institutions including SculptureCenter (USA, 2024), Hessel Museum of Art (USA, 2019), Museum of Contemporary Art (USA, 2018), Kunstinstituut Melly (Netherlands, 2016), Kunsthalle Wien (Austria, 2015).
Residency project
“Let it see you only in the shape of your shadows / walking bumblebees think faster” (working title) anticipates a body of work set in sites across scales of time from Neolithic to present in the Balkans. Research begun in Bosnia-Herzegovina and to be continued in Tirana and its surroundings will be a framework for poetic and idiosyncratic filmic installations exploring the nature of language, categorization, perception, and existence, with animals as potential protagonists. The phrase, Let it see you only in the shape of your shadows, comes from a computational study in robotics, where a machine was trained to see the world only through shadows, and the idea of estimating a quantum state — perceptual parameters to inform the experiential qualities of the work itself.
Austria
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Stephanie Rizaj , Austria
Split Stories of Endless Thoughts
Biography
Stephanie Rizaj lives and works between Brussels and Vienna. Her artistic practice encompasses site-specific installations, videos, and sculptures. Rizaj’s work explores the brutality of everyday life, power relations, production conditions, class structures and the collective desire to belong. Stephanie Rizaj has exhibited her work int. in various institutions, including Botanique (Belgium, 2023), Loop Barcelona (Spain, 2021), Diagonale (Austria, 2021), Manifesta 13 (France, 2020), Dokufest (Kosovo, 2019).
Residency project
In 1980, a blue train brought an empty coffin to Belgrade. That same year, Zastava began manufacturing the Yugo, a car that would come to symbolize an era of both hope and disillusionment. A year later, in 1981, as tensions continued to rise, students in Kosovo initiated a protest movement that would have lasting consequences. Many years later, Stephanie Rizaj discovered video footage of a former Communist Party member documenting his escape from the dissolution of a socialist state to a capitalist society, which ultimately led him to Las Vegas. This footage reveals a complex double life, capturing the layers of a journey and the transformation of identity in an unfamiliar world.
China
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Zhiqian Wang, China
A Shadow Moves Through the City
Biography
Zhiqian Wang was born in 1999, China. She lives and works in New York City.
Her works range from interventions, analog film to work on paper or silk. She constructs experimental systems that test the boundaries of meanings through material process, concept, and interaction. Her research interests include the philosophy of science, language, and metaphysics.
Zhiqian Wang’s work has been presented in numerous institutions including The Jewish Museum, USA (2023), Contemporary Arts Center, USA (2023), and performs at MoMA PS1, USA (2023), Performa Biennial, USA (2023), Art, Culture, and Technology at MIT, USA (2018).
Residency project
“A Shadow Moves Through the City” is a project of an experimental essay film shot on 16mm, which merges fiction, philosophical research, and documentary. The film draws on the life and ideas of philosopher and logician Jean Cavaillès, a member of the French Resistance, who was portrayed as Saint Luc Jardie in Jean-Pierre Melville’s “Army of Shadows”. In reality, Cavaillès was betrayed, imprisoned, and executed by the Gestapo on February 17, 1944. While in prison, he wrote “On Logic and the Theory of Science”, where he critiques the idea that knowledge and truth are grounded in individual consciousness or a fixed origin. He emphasizes that mathematical and scientific truths emerge through historical processes, shaped by action and contingency. For him, knowledge is dynamic, evolving through continuous engagement with external realities, much like the progression of historical events. Shot at sites related to Cavaillès’ life in Paris, the film investigates the foundations of science and mathematics and their equivocal relationship to reality and history.
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France
Learn moreWandrille Potez, France
"Eagles and Angels"
Biography
Born in 1996, Wandrille Potez works at the intersection of photography, art history, and journalism. For the past decade, he has been exploring little-known or endangered territories, striving to document them in time while reviving—through the lens of contemporary issues—the spirit of the 19th-century photographic inventory missions. His writing, oscillating between personal narrative and activist commitment to site preservation, seeks to restore the link between a society and its heritage. His research along the shores of the Mediterranean (Algeria, Egypt, Greece) has, since 2022, crystallized in Albania, where the rapid transformation of the landscape—faster than anywhere else in Europe—has lent his subject a sense of urgency and necessity. He joined the Vila 31 after a year's residency at the Villa Marmottan (Académie des Beaux-Arts) to continue working on a book combining images and narratives.
Residency project
In Tirana, Wandrille Potez has chosen to deepen a central chapter of his exploratory itineraries, dedicated to a constellation of post-Byzantine monasteries located in the Drino Valley. By giving new visibility to these extremely fragile structures, he seeks to resist the erasure of places, sustain the memory of the religious repression orchestrated by Enver Hoxha, and draw attention to the State’s shortcomings in safeguarding historical monuments. The project marks the beginning of a long-term series—at times contemplative, at times ardent, even feverish—which will be presented for the first time in Albania, within the highly symbolic space of Vila 31.
His residency is part of Art Explora’s collaboration with ORAMA Association, which has co-designed and supported, alongside Art Explora, the development of a two-month artist residency program dedicated to photography within the Tirana – Vila 31 x Art Explora initiative.
Find out more about our residences
The 2025 Selection Committee
Independent curator and essayist
Learn morePierre Bal-Blanc is an art critic and curator. Editor-in-chief of the magazine Bloc Notes (1998-2000), co-founder of the Design Mental agency, he directed the Centre d'art contemporain de Brétigny-sur-Orge (2003-2014).
Pierre Bal-Blanc was associate curator of Documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel. Resonating with the societal thought of Charles Fourier, he is developing the "Phalanstère Project", a series of in situ proposals that critically restructure the logics of labor accumulation.
The most important aspect of his curatorial work is "de-gentrification", inspired by the philosophical work of Pierre Klossowski.
Pierre Bal-Blanc's projects regularly address the paradoxes of perversion and transgression, of the living and the object, through the processes of industrialization and production.
Directors of Hamburger Bahnhof: National Gallery for Contemporary Art, Berlin
Learn moreTill Fellrath and Sam Bardaouil have been curators and co-directors of Hamburger Bahnhof: Berlin's Museum of Contemporary Art since 2008.
Together they founded the multidisciplinary curatorial platform Art Reoriented in Munich and New York.
They were curators of the 2022 Lyon Biennale, and curators of the French Pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale, as well as affiliated curators at Berlin's Gropius Bau until 2021.
Their exhibitions have been shown at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Gwangju and Busan art museums in South Korea, Tate Liverpool and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden.
Curator, author and director of Tirana Art Lab - Contemporary Art Center, Albania
Learn moreAdela Demetja is an Albanian curator born in Tirana.
She is the director of Tirana Art Lab - Center for Contemporary Art, which she founded in 2010.
As a freelance curator, she has organized numerous exhibitions internationally and with institutions such as Tirana's National Art Gallery, Kosovo's National Art Gallery, Berlin's Maxim Gorki Theater and Portland's Institute for Contemporary Research.
She curated the Albanian pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale, represented by Lumturi Blloshmi.
She is the founder and director of "Curating with Care", an alternative conservation training programme based in Tirana.
Curator, lecturer, educator. Director of ΕΜΣΤ | National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens.
Learn moreKaterina Gregos is a curator and writer. Since 2021, she has been director of the National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMΣT), in Athens.
For over 20 years, her curatorial work has explored the relationship between art, society and politics, with a particular focus on issues of democracy, human rights, economics, ecology, crises and changes in global production circuits. As an independent curator, she has organized Riga, Manifesta and Goteborg.
She has also curated three national pavilions at the Venice Biennale: Denmark (2011), Belgium (2015) and Croatia (2019).
This year, she is curator of the Greek pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale. She divides her time between Athens and Brussels.
Curator, Création Contemporaine et Prospective department, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris
Learn moreAlicia Knock has been a curator for contemporary creation at the Centre Pompidou since 2015.
Her work focuses on modern and contemporary art from Africa and Central Europe, with a particular emphasis on acquisitions and exhibitions.
In 2018, she created the "Cercle international Afrique" of the Friends of the Centre Pompidou.
She seeks to propose innovative, creative and forward-looking exhibition formats that question the museum of tomorrow from a decolonial perspective. Her work is also committed to giving greater visibility to women artists.
She has been commissioned to curate the Albanian pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale.
She has worked with numerous art institutions, including the Palais de Tokyo in Paris and MoMA PS1 in New York.
Art historian, contemporary art critic, curator and artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries, London
Learn moreHans Ulrich Obrist was born in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1968. Hans Ulrich Obrist is artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries in London.
Previously, he was curator of the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Since his first exhibition "World Soup, The Kitchen Show" in 1991, he has organized over 300 exhibitions.
Obrist has lectured worldwide at academic and art institutions, and contributed to Artforum, AnOther Magazine, Cahiers d'Art, and 032C; he is a regular contributor to Mousse and Kaleidoscope and writes columns for Das Magazin and Weltkunst.
In 2011, he received the CCS Bard Award for Curatorial Excellence and, in 2015, the International Folkwang Prize for his commitment to the arts.
Hans Ulrich Obrist is a member of the Art Explora selection committee for residencies in Paris.
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