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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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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Lumturie 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.

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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.

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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.

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).

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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

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), his practice is shaped by improvisation, bodily expression, sewing, and drawing as tools for communication, identity, and survival. Through figuration, narration, and collective performance, Gillet challenges dominant hearingcentered aesthetics and gives visibility to voices and histories that are rarely heard.

‍Residency project

Arthur Gillet is developing an artistic project centered on the concept of “umbilical language,” a form of communication emerging between hearing children and their deaf parents beyond spoken language. Drawing on his experience as a CODA (Child of Deaf Adults), the project explores the sensory, emotional, and therapeutic dimensions of non-verbal communication, particularly vibration as a bodily medium. Through performance, video, installation, painting, and relational practices, the work addresses themes of inverted parenthood, isolation, linguistic rupture, and the historical stigmatization of sign language. In Albania, Gillet will expand this research through archival material and collaborations with local deaf associations.

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.

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.

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‍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

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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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Vartan 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.

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Archive 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.

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.