program

from 6 December 2024 to 11 February 2025

alban muja

Fragments of Walls

Trieste Contemporanea, at the end of the exhibition activities planned for its Dialogues with the Art of Central Eastern Europe 2024, is pleased to invite you on December 6th (6:00 pm) to the opening of Fragments of Walls, a solo exhibition by artist Alban Muja. The exhibition, curated by Jehona Morina, project manager at the Taxipalais Kunsthalle Tirol, is organized in collaboration with Charim Galerie in Vienna and will remain open to the public until February 11th, 2025.

This exhibition brings together two projects by Muja set against the urban landscapes of Albania and Kosovo: the two-channel video installation Why Kamza (2021) and the series of watercolors on paper Above Everyone (2022-23).

Muja’s practice – as the curator tells us in her introductory text to the exhibition – is driven by the evolving dynamics of social, political, and economic transformations in his native Kosovo and the wider Balkans. By highlighting the interplay between rebuilding and regulation, individuality and collective order, the works provide a layered perspective on a society in self-realization and transformation.

In Fragments of Walls – Jehona Morina continues – Muja explores the subtle traces of the past that continue to manifest in the material realities of the present. His works invite us to look beyond the visible—to consider how structures, both physical and symbolic, can reflect more than just the practicalities of construction; they suggest histories imbued with an unrelenting search for stability. Prompting us to think not only about the places we live in, but also about the very forces that shape those places—memory, narrative, power structures—ultimately posing a larger question: How do these tensions between past and present shape not just a place but an identity, both personal and collective, that emerge within it?

Alban Muja is born in 1980 in Mitrovica, Kosovo, and lives and works between Berlin and Prishtina. He has exhibited internationally: recently at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Skopje (2024), at the Manifesta Biennale 14 in Prishtina, and at the ISCP in New York (2022), at the National Gallery of Kosovo in Prishtina (2021), at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Koroška in Slovenj Gradec, Slovenia (2021), at the Ludwig Museum in Budapest (2020), and in the same year at the 3rd Biennale of Industrial Art in Istria, Croatia.

Read the full introduction by Jehona Morina here