Karpa: Out of the Anonymity of the Contemporary

Artists: Bora Baboçi, Nora Bzheta, Flaka Haliti, Blerta Hashani, Dritan Hyska, Ledia Kostandini, Alketa Ramaj, Leonard Qylafi, Anri Sala, Driton Selmani, Irgin Sena, Abi Shehu; Curator: Adela Demetja

Bringing together artists from Albania, Kosovo, and the diaspora, Karpa. Out of the Anonymity of the Contemporary unfolds as a journey through a layered terrain of material, psychological, political, and transcendent associations. The exhibition does not seek to escape the contemporary, but to move beyond the accelerated circulation of forms and meanings, which risks rendering them indistinguishable and transient.

Karpa. Out of the Anonymity of the Contemporary proposes a space in which time is reconfigured, perception heightened, and awareness expanded. Rather than following a singular narrative, fragments, gestures, images, and forms accumulate, creating a field of shifting associations.

The contexts from which the participating artists emerge have long been subject to external projections, interpretations, and imposed narratives. In response, the exhibition turns towards perspectives articulated from within. Rather than seeking to define a territory, identity, or population, the works construct personal and situated positions from which different realities can be perceived. They become vessels for broader questions concerning existence, belonging, memory, and the relationship of the individual to nature and collective structures.

The exhibition takes its title and conceptual point of departure from Karpa, one of Albanian writer Martin Camaj’s (1925-1992) late works, published in 1987 during his exile. Often described as a modernist and dystopian novel, Karpa is set in the fictional future of 2338, in an isolated settlement in northern Albania. With its fragmented and non-linear narrative, dense symbolic language, and destabilised conventional notions of time and reality the novel functions less as a traditional narrative and more as a constructed philosophical space.

The exhibition does not seek to illustrate Camaj’s novel. Rather, it draws upon the atmosphere, logic, and imaginary that Karpa opens up. Within Camaj’s constructed world, time becomes unstable, identity is shaped through collective structures, and questions of individual agency, control, belonging, and freedom unfold within an enclosed system. The possibility of moving beyond this condition emerges not simply through physical escape, but through shifts in perception and expanded forms of consciousness.

The works in the exhibition similarly generate their own temporalities. Rather than fully submitting to the accelerated logic of the contemporary, they establish forms of presence that are layered, cyclical, persistent, and, at times, suspended. This temporal displacement resonates with Karpa, where linear time gradually gives way to a condition in which the distinctions between past, present, memory, and projection become blurred.

Although rooted in current realities, the works engage with conditions that extend beyond the immediate present: memory and belonging, individual and collective existence, relations of power, and the changing relationship between human beings, nature, and territory.

Adela Demetja is a curator based in Tirana. Since September 2025, she has served as Director of the National Gallery of Arts of Albania. Previously, Demetja was the founding director of Tirana Art Lab – Center for Contemporary Art, and the Albanian Visual Arts Network, initiatives that have strengthened the country’s independent art ecosystem.

Museum and Gallery MUZA (MUZA), based in Ljubljana, is dedicated to the preservation, development and presentation of the NLB Art Collection, one of the largest corporate collections of modern and contemporary art in Slovenia and Southeast Europe. MUZA represents a distinctive model of a corporate collection operating as an active cultural institution. Established in 1999, the NLB Art Collection focuses on Slovenian art of the 20th and 21st centuries and was officially recognised as cultural heritage by the Slovenian Ministry of Culture in 2018. MUZA was established in 2020 to oversee the collection’s management, research, conservation, exhibitions, publications and public programmes. More recently, MUZA has expanded its collecting strategy to contemporary art from Southeast Europe, acquiring works by artists from the former Yugoslavia, Albania and Kosovo, including their diasporas.

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