Notes from the Upperground

In ‘Notes from the Upperground’, headstones from Tirana’s graveyards are seen from their back side. Portrait-like, the photographs focus on the stones’ silhouettes and their formal aesthetic information. The photographs deliberately obscure all of the graves’ personal details, reducing the headstones to their shape alone. In most societies, graveyards are filled with religious symbolism, but here the forms have been replaced with new peculiar designs, ones that seemingly erase the signs of religious and communist pasts of Albania. Instead, I would argue that they represent the hybrid identity of contemporary Albanian society: the bygone collectivist, communist system has morphed today into our consumerist, individualist reality, constructing new imagery along the way.

Bazament Art Space, Tirana, 2019