Produced over the span of a decade, the fifteen works on display in Alban Muja’s solo show “Whatever Happens, We Will Be Prepared,” curated by Maria Isserlis, surveyed the lasting effects of war and political transition in Kosovo. The exhibition’s title is a phrase heard in the three-channel video installation Family Album, 2019, which was originally shown in the Pavilion of the Republic of Kosovo at the Fifty-Eighth Venice Biennale. To create this work, Muja tracked down and interviewed children from iconic war photographs that circulated in global media during the 1998–99 Kosovo War. Now adults, Agim, Besa, Besim, and Jehona narrate their and their families’ wartime experiences, which they access through the same mediatized photographs. By turning these images into narratives, in collaboration with the narrators, Muja domesticates the photographs and inserts them into the speakers’ family albums. The work invites viewers, as well, to exercise “postmemory” by exploring intricate recollections of events not always directly experienced, but whose imprint has been handed down to the following generation.

Muja’s ability to shift registers enables him to navigate difficult questions of identity. In his works, personal histories always intervene and intersect with a larger national narrative. We saw this clearly on the second floor of the gallery in pieces such as My Name Their City, 2012, a suite of photographic portraits of Kosovo Albanians named after the cities in Albania that the subjects’ parents were unable to visit during Enver Hoxha’s dictatorship, which lasted from 1941 to 1985. A later work, It’s a Beautiful Name but It Can Sometimes Be a Burden, 2021, is a series of thirteen photographs that asks what’s in a name. Here, Muja’s photographs of French-born children of immigrant parents from diverse backgrounds are accompanied by interview extracts in which the subjects tell stories about the connection of their names to their family heritage. The act of naming is a commemorative gesture performed by the narrators’ parents, through which they preserve family and national histories in dialogue with their adoptive country, France. While the names hold a personal value and a connection to their countries of origin for the parents, they are often a heavy burden for the adult children, because for them home has multiple locations.

A series of nine paintings, “Above Everyone,” 2020, and the sculpture We Don’t Need Another Hero, 2021, offer new readings of postwar architecture and commemorative practices. “Above Everyone” locates architectural discontinuities in the aftermath of the Kosovo War, when the increased demand for living space led to citizens building apartments on top of existing residential buildings without permits from local authorities and in violation of housing codes. These additions expressed private tastes and often had nothing to do with the architectural style of the existing structures. The spare painterly approach deployed by Muja allows him to reimagine the spaces these apartments are embedded in, to cancel out the stylistic noise that usually surrounds them, and, with that, to have us reconsider the common presumption that they are ugly. We Don’t Need Another Hero takes the form of a bust of the artist himself. Between mockery and mimicry, Muja’s gypsum self-portrait evokes the heroic iconography that characterizes the majority of the statues unveiled across Kosovo to commemorate those who died during the war. Under these representational conventions,which have become the norm for how warriors are represented, Muja’s bust takes on the proportions of just “another hero” whom he rejects and ridicules. These new works show how Muja has continued his investigation into the ways personal and national identities are shaped in the in-between of personal memory and public history in the ever-changing political landscape of modern Kosovo.

— Erëmirë Krasniqi