Alban Muja | In spite of everything, there is a wall

One of the usual misunderstandings in thinking about the contemporary art practices of the Balkan countries is to approach them only from the perspective of “the nation.” This results in the dialectics between objective social conditions and the configuration of artistic subjectivities getting mediated and represented predominantly through the dynamics of nationalism.
Sezgin Boynik

Working across a wide range of media including drawing, painting, photography, video installation and performance, Alban Muja (b. 1980, Kosovo) investigates through single artistic acts the complex history and the socio-political transformation of his native Kosovo and the surrounding region. In Muja’s work, the thoughts and subjectivities of art are indissociable from politics. The exhibition In spite of everything, there is a wall, the first presentation of the artist’s work at Charim Gallery, Vienna, includes a selection of recent and older works. Exploring geopolitical, social and economic issues, Muja poetically – sometimes ironically – enquires into the founding ties between gender, family, territory and ultimately the State. Is art defined by ideological forces maintained by a nation?

The gallery space is divided in half by a thick brick wall, a new installation Red Wall (2021) conceived for the exhibition and built by Gastarbeiters – a term that originated in 1960 in Germany and Austria to describe guest workers – from the Balkan region. Implicating a viewing gaze and a set of structural relationships, geographical and territorial, Muja brings attention to the Balkan community in Vienna, traditionally rooted in construction work, and the phenomenon of migrant labour, envisioned as guest citizens hence deprived of social tools of economic and legal security. The strong identitarian connection and troubled division between Albania and Kosovo is a continuous theme in the artist’s work.

The film Legendary Dog (2014), projected in a small room, follows the story of Alba, an Illyrian Shepherd or Sharri dog, owned by the pioneering couple Ulay and Marina Abramović. Ulay, interviewed by Muja, narrates in first person the film project and van journey conducted in 1977 by him and Abramović across the Yugoslavian border of Kosovo and then dictatorship-ruled Albania, the dog becoming a symbol of border restrictions and identity.

This connection is also reinforced by the photographic series My name their city (2012). Exploring a phenomenon amply diffused in the seventies and eighties – Albanians of Kosovo nostalgically naming their children after Albania’s towns – single straight shots portray people holding a postcard-like representational image of an Albanian city. Berat, Milot, Saranda, Gjirokastra, Shkodran, Butrint, Vlora embody the familiar scissions created after the Second World War and the nationalist dream of unification of all Albanian territories, an ideological driving force culminating with the independence of Kosovo on the 17th of February 2008.

Employing the house, a nuclear infrastructure, as a signifier of national ideas, Muja explores broader issues and conflicts in the formation of subjectivities. As Marc Augé writes in Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (1995), ‘The layout of the house, the rules of residence, the zoning of the village, placement of altars, configuration of public open spaces, land distribution, correspond for every individual to a system of possibilities, prescriptions and interdicts whose content is both spatial and social.’

A long line of painted canvases – Brotherhood (ongoing) – portrays a series of almost identical brick houses. We observe corresponding facades varying only in small details such as paint colours or roof coverings. The phenomenon, amply diffused in rural Kosovo, mimics the patriarchal construction of society, based upon a central male father figure – the first house, the symbol of the family, the phallus – and extends only to the brothers: a copy of the house is rebuilt for every male individual in the family. These uncanny architectural clusters, often outstanding for their unusually eclectic exteriors, reflect familial bonds, misogyny and female exclusion from society. The series of new canvases Above everyone (2021), illustrating private residences built on top of public buildings, considers social antagonism and the development of abusive architecture. Signifiers of individual desires of affirmation and rejection of socialist principles in ex-Yugoslavian territories, these houses stand as a declaration of refusal and non-integration.

‘The house, quite obviously, is a privileged entity for a phenomenological study of the intimate values of inside space, provided, of course, that we take it in both its unity and its complexity, and endeavor to integrate all the special values in one fundamental value. For the house furnishes us dispersed images and a body of images at the same time,’ suggests Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space (1957). For Muja the visual documentation of these architectures is always associated with storytelling and qualitative research, employed as a tool of social and anthropological analysis. An anthropological place functions on a variable scale, becoming places of identity, of relations, of history.

With the work Borders without borders (2016–2017), the artist enlarges his reflection on monuments and the idea of territorial division. A series of eighteen black-and-white photographs, aesthetically reminiscent of the clinical approach typical of the Düsseldorf School of Photography, depict abandoned former border-crossing buildings across the Schengen Area. Expressing a dual message of freedom and restraint, the empty buildings assume an eerie feeling, their function neglected, their presence a statement of former division. By drawing attention to these edifices, Muja questions his native Kosovo, where this kind of infrastructure is still operating and freedom of movement restricted, confronting us with the absurdity and violence of political division.

In spite of everything, there is a wall.

Attilia Fattori Franchini