Abi Shehu

Abi Shehu presents selected completed works and other works in progress in an open studio situation. She invites visitors and guests to join her in thinking and talking about landscapes of transition as they relate to memory, subjectivity and ecology.

These are themes she explores in her analogue photography and video installations, which up until now have concentrated on the layers of time and perception that both form and inform her homeland.

Albania is a country still coming to terms with the historic isolation and endemic paranoia of the communist era. It is a place characterised by stark contrasts: vast mountain ranges meet mushroom-like bunkers scattered across the countryside, while ramshackle houses in remote villages coexist with high-rise apartment blocks and hotels in the cities and along the coast.

As part of her residency in Prishtina, she is pursuing a new line of artistic research around the city’s missing river, which was covered in the 1970s. Its absence is still keenly felt today.

Abi Shehu (1993, AL) is an Albanian multi-disciplinary visual artist. Abi Shehu’s work is influenced by in-depth aesthetic research. She creates portraits of humanity by exploring fundamental existential experiences, such as: death rituals, memory, amnesia and unconsciousness.

Her artistic research can be described as an archaeology of unconsciousness. Through a combination of visual and media art, from installation to sound art, she recreates the unconscious landscapes that create the unrepresentable and unknowable dimensions of people, societies, places and historical events.