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Petrified Psychograms

Anyone who has ever travelled in the Balkans, and in particular in Albania, is familiar with the following typical picture of the landscape: the unfinished carcasses and windowless shells of buildings lying in the open fields as if they had fallen from the sky, without any relation to the topography. Anonymous architecture that seems to proclaim, almost defiantly, a new beginning after the end of the country’s Communist dictatorship.

Architectural landscapes, which – like cleared areas of forest – seem to have been artificially reforested and now exist without identity and without roots. Ill-proportioned physical space in a global “copy and paste” style, which makes reference to some fantasy tradition or other, perhaps one which has been generated by the media; ‘media architecture’, as the artist Edi Hila calls it, architecture which provides an apt image of the state of society in Albania, just as the image of the physiognomy of a human being reveals his or her inner state.

With his series “Portraits of Houses” (2000–2005), which is presented in this issue of -“Report”, the artist Edi Hila (born 1944 in Shkodër, Albania) wanted to document the social transformation of post-dictatorship Albania: “In this respect, I see the culture, the politics and the state of being of my home country as being frozen in a historical moment,” says Hila. “If one travels through the Albanian countryside, one discovers this in the form of the free-standing carcasses and shells of buildings and abandoned houses, often already overgrown with grass”. Like in the poorer cities of the USA in the 1980s, most of the post-modern designs that were executed in a mixture of architectural styles arose from a desire for a previously lacking urban character and an architectural history, and “acquired very peculiar silhouettes that were unrelated to their location, as a result of the awkward urge-to-create of nouveau riche owners”, says Hila. According to the artist, “these houses now stand there alienated from their original purpose like foreign objects in their surroundings, abstract and absurd”. They lack people to live in them and nevertheless these peoples desires and wishes are still there in the form of architecture. For Hila, these houses are portraits, petrified psychograms of their owners, which also explains the title of the series: “Portraits of Houses”.
Hila does not portray them in a direct way using a camera, but uses the less immediate approach of painting them. In applying the acrylic paint to the canvas he produces a glaze, as if he were painting a watercolour, a method that is typical for his style of painting, that of ‘poetic realism’, depicting the house at the centre of the space, as in a classical portrait, fading out the surroundings and transforming it to an essential object with its own primal aura and metaphysics. It seems to be conserved in a strange time vacuum, bizarrely motionless and possessing a ghostly transparency.
The painter Edi Hila studied at the Academy of Fine Art in Tirana in the 1960s and today holds a professorship there. For the young Albanian generation of artists who have become internationally successful (e.g. Adrian Paci or Anri Sala), he is one of the most influential initiators and ambassadors. His style of painting is always figurative and is classified as ‘poetic realism’. Hila typically uses motifs from everyday life (for example TV images), which he transforms onto a metaphysical level on the canvas. Although Hila’s work has already been shown at a few individual exhibitions in Albania and abroad (the last having been the Villa Romana in Florence in 2008), it has nevertheless, to date, not yet received international resonance. In the early 1960s he was sentenced to indefinite period of detention in a labour camp on account of a commissioned work that had not found favour with the Albanian Hoxha regime and later he was banned from exhibiting, a ban that remained in force until the regime came to an end. Hila: “The Communist tragedy tried to extinguish all values and destroy all identities. I was isolated with my art for more than 20 years, but I refused to be deterred and continued painting.”


Edi Hila was born in 1944 in Shkodër (Albania), and lives and works in Tirana. He studied at the State Art Academy in Tirana (AFA), graduating in
1967. He has been Dean of the Faculty of Visual Art there since 1993, and since 1996 Professor of the Faculty of Visual Art.

Individual exhibitions (selection)
2008  “
Senza angeli”, Villa Romana, Florence
Zeta Gallery, Tirana
2007  
Zeta Gallery, Tirana, ‘UNREVEALED GRAPHICS 1970-1989’
2006  “
Suburban“, Badischer Kunstverein, 
Karlsruhe
2004  The Kosova Art Gallery, Prishtina
2001  Skendi Gallery, Tirana
1998  “Comfort”, National Gallery, Tirana
1996  Gallery de Vergere Sion, Switzerland
1994  Ikast herning, Denmark
1993  ACUD Galerie, Berlin
1992  COBRA Galerie, Brussels
1991  National Gallery, Tirana

Group exhibitions (selection)
2006
“Art, Life & Confusion”, October Salon, Belgrade
“Adrian Paci presents: Edi Hila e Giovanni de Lazzari”, Galleria Francesca Kaufmann, Milan
“Interrupted Histories”, Museum of Contemporary Art, Ljubljana

2005
“Sweet Taboos”, Tirana Biennale 3

2004
“Love it or leave it”, Cetinje Biennale V
“Reappearance”, Museum of Kosovo, Prishtina

2003
“In den Schluchten des Balkan”, Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel
“Blood & Honey/Future’s in the Balkans”, the Essl Collection, Vienna

2002
“Small Brother”, International Prize Onufri 2002, Second Prize, Galleria Nazionale, Tirana

2001
“Beautiful Strangers”, IFA Galerie, Berlin
“Silhouettes”, Tirana Biennale e pare, Tirana
“The Art of Balkan Countries”, Thessaloniki

2000
Chantal Crousel Gallery, Paris
Zoumboulakis Gallery, Athens
“After the Wall”, Ludwig Museum, Budapest
“After the Wall”, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin
“In and Out”, National Gallery, Tirana

“I try to analyse the ‘bad’ architecture, the ‘accidental’ architecture, the ‘powerful’ architecture and all the other kinds of architecture that I encounter as if it were a painter’s human model, in order to understand its individuality, the way of thinking behind it, the paradoxes involved in it, and perhaps also the great power of capital and the media, which manipulate it.”
Edi Hila