Lumturi Blloshmi, Albanian Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale

About

Demetja became friends with Blloshmi in 2016 and was one of her close collaborators until the end of her life.

Lumturi Blloshmi has the needed remarkable biography, the powerful personality and most importantly, the qualitative body of work which makes her unique and significant for the national and international contemporary art discourse. Lumturi Blloshmi's body of work fits very well within this year's theme of the Venice Art Biennale titled “The Milk of Dreams”. The title is borrowed from a book by Leonora Carrington, in which, as the curator of the Biennale Cecilia Alemani says; “the Surrealist artist describes a magical world where life is constantly re-envisioned through the prism of the imagination, and where everyone can change, be transformed, become something and someone else. The exhibition takes us on an imaginary journey through metamorphoses of the body and definitions of humanity.”
Like almost all the artists of her generation, Lumturi Blloshmi painted in socialist realism style until the end of the 80s. After the 90s she was nevertheless one of the few artists of her generation that managed to constantly reposition and transform herself and her work successfully until the end of her life.

Lumturi Blloshmi’s works in painting, photography, installation, and performance are characterized by a certain irony and distinct way of reflecting and overcoming the reality in which she lived. Her dynamic personality and self-awareness, nourished by philosophy, poetry, sensuality and spirituality, have given form to a distinctive body of work that bears witness to the remarkable journey of a creative spirit who endured and created despite political, physical and ideological limitations imposed by life and by the particular context of Communist Albania after the Second World War.

Blloshmi stood in the middle of her cosmos, not a passive viewer but rather an active participant. This allowed her to openly express her perceptions about the art world and its mechanisms and the society of which she was part. Her view was that of a strong woman criticizing and provoking with humor the power establishment dominated by men. What makes her oeuvre remarkable is the symbolic simplicity and optimism she uses when dealing with the harsh reality. Oftentimes Blloshmi depicted herself in her paintings, performances and photographs. By doing so, she clearly created, through subjectivity, a relationship between herself and the given social-political context, which allowed her and us to perceive history and reality from a self-defined and personal point of view.