The solo exhibition of the artist Ledia Kostandini opened on April 19, 2018 at Bazament Art Space in Tirana. It was the first time that this exhibition was on view for the public.
For seven years, Ledia Kostandini has worked with a collection of postcards, discovered by the artist herself in 2011, but sent to her family members (grandfather, father, uncles and aunts) over a period of 40 years. The content is simple and discloses the social and emotional interaction between the sender and the receiver of the postcards. The latter (capturing Albanian cities and landscapes) were sent from cities across Albania to Pogradec, between the years 1950 and 1990, the period of communist isolation in Albania.
The artist makes an art installation out of the postcards, the primary intent of which is communication. The postcards become an art medium to present the liaison with times and not with people.
These postcards give the idea of naive well wishes messages but, nonetheless, they encouraged the artist to travel across the country with the aim to explore “the Albania from the postcard”, but discovering a new country en voyage.
The postcards are placed in a small wooden box: on the left is the old postcard, where one can read the well wishes in its backside; next to it the artist has re-captured the same view of every postcard in today’s time. Every single part of Let Us Meet In Between positions the same geographical location, split in between the old times and the new ones.
This duality relates to a lived reality: her grandfather passed away following a heart attack on New Year’s Eve in 1982 with his burial taking place the following day. Though, his sudden death did not stop the postcards that had already been mailed to him. The exhibition at Bazament Gallery reveals the lived paradox among times: the past, the present and the future.
Naturally, the current reality in Albania similar to other realities in the world would not remain the same, and undeniably has changed throughout the years. This is the aim of the artist, who presents her exploration of shifting time through old postcards and re-captured photos of the exact views of Albania.
After all these years, today’s Albania does not resemble the country it used to be in the past. In this context, the curatorial concept of the exhibition referrers to the Italian writer Italo Calvino, who observed the “invisible” Maurilia: “just as the old postcards do not depict Maurilia as it was, but a different city which, by chance, was called Maurilia, like this one”. Albania, like Maurialia, becomes a fiction of its own making.
*Ledia Kostandini is an Albanian artist based in Tirana. A graduate of the University of Arts, Tirana, her practice spans diverse media, including photography, painting, installation, public interventions, and illustration.
