Blerta Hashani

‘Diell në Fijet e Barit / The Sun on the Blades of Grass’

16.10-20.11.25

There is a cinematic quality in Blerta Hashani’s work. A quality that does not reveal itself immediately. Her work is painterly, with lines, and brushstrokes at the forefront of her oeuvre. Therefore, this cinematic quality is a quiet revelation as it were, a quality one discovers the more one delves into her work. There is the frame within the frame in her well-known pieces, such as “The Earth Chose Me, I Chose the Earth” (2025), where she uses the jute stacks as the background on which she places her paintings. Then, there is the layering of paintings with elements of some part of a landscape that impressed upon her — a brushstroke, a sentence, a piece of paper, or material from her surroundings — with another layer, another detail, a gesture, a line depicting another moment. This aspect of the temporal, and the sequential, renders her work with this cinematic quality, and divulges her deep preoccupation with that which is fleeting, and transient.
It is the changing of the seasons in her village Mirash, or the passing of time marked by the traditional embroidery sewn by her mother in her youth, elements of which she then reuses in her own work in “Untitled” (eight pieces on fiberboard, 2024), where Hashani insists on inviting the past for a dialogue. Intimately, endearingly, she beckons it, proposing an exchange, and in this way, an active place in the present world.