Edi Hila | Thea Djordjadze

The artist Edi Hila was born in 1944 in Shkodër, Albania, weeks before the country was liberated from Nazi rule by local communist forces. Decades of political turmoil ensued: Albania became a satellite state of the USSR, and though the nation began to try to plough its own furrow in the 1960s, socialist realism remained the dominant artistic mode. Hila fell foul of this orthodoxy in 1972, when he exhibited his sunny pastoral fantasia Planting of Trees: he was banished for re-education and banned from exhibiting his art. But in the ’90s he gained a reputation as ‘the painter of the Albanian transition’ for documenting Albania’s turbulent post-communist period. Hila finally came to international prominence in 2017 when several of his works were shown at documenta 14. This exhibition in Hamburg pairs his work with sculptures and site-specific works by Thea Djordjazde (b. 1971), a Georgian artist who has also reckoned with the legacy of the Soviet Union (25 April–5 October).

Find out more from the Hamburger Kunsthalle’s website.
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People of the Future 1–3 (1997) from the Migrations series by Edi Hila. Photo: Lorenzo Palmieri; courtesy the artist and Galleria Raffaella Cortese, Milan – Albisola; © the artist

Installation view of o potio n. by Thea Djordjadze at Portikus, Frankfurt, in 2018. Photo: Diana Pfammatter; © Thea Djordjadze/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2024

House Surrounded by Wall (2000) from the Transitional Landscapes series by Edi Hila. Courtesy the artist/Gallery Mitterrand; © the artist