On September 30, 2024, Harabel inaugurated the exhibition ‘Domestic Spaces’ at the GurGur Gallery in Petrelë, featuring the works of recent graduates from the Department of Art and Design at Polis University: Anja Çapuni, Dorina Xhemollari, Egi Bozhiqi, Lusinda Culhaj, Megi Kodra, Rinela Skora, Sara Tafaram and Sevasti Ndini.

“Domestic space” refers to the private space of the home, as opposed to public or urban space in an entire city. In the 1970s, the duality of private versus public space was criticized by many feminists, including artists who viewed public space as a site of visible patriarchal exercise, contrasting it with the cramped and isolated space to which women were relegated—the domestic space itself.

When referred to in the plural, domestic spaces overcome the idea of a clear dichotomy between public and private spaces, transcending, in a certain sense, at least potentially, the notion of gender-oriented spaces. This overcoming becomes evident in the exhibition through works that use and reinterpret domestic space as a subjective and sometimes psychological space. The domestic becomes a metaphor for “familiar” or “intimate,” where the ideas of feminists from the 1970s contrast the subjective with the collective. Household objects, family stories, traumas, and complex subjectivities populate the exhibition “Domestic Spaces.”

The artists present in the exhibition, all women, use ordinary and found objects from the domestic not merely to represent it, but to subvert the notion of a linear narrative of women as homemakers. The woman within these new contemporary “domestic spaces” is a complex subject who becomes an agent of a plurality of activities: playing within the domestic context as a child; drawing in her notebook; photographing memories and historical traces of the domestic as social spaces for loved ones; sheltering in bed; covering herself with blankets as a way to express burden; or installing a traditional dining room, now a casual space within the everyday.

In this way, the works in the exhibition utilize domestic tools as the letters of a new alphabet or language that is symptomatic of a space between gender and between the understanding of the public and the private. A new dimension that can instrumentalize domesticity and its symbols, historically and socially constructed as spaces of relegation, in order to transform them into intimate spaces of self-expression.

From the curatorial text of Remijon Pronja