Edi Hila edited by Anri Sala. Ediz. multilingue

This publication, conceived by museo Madre, is more than a simple book; it is an artists’ book in which Anri Sala interacts with the corpus of paintings by Edi Hila. As Eva Fabbris, the Director of museo Madre, points out in her brief essay, Sala engages Hila’s work in a contemplative and cinematic way, allowing the historical and political consciousness the two share to surface gradually through the sequencing of images. Born thirty years apart in Albania, Hila and Sala share not only a geography but a historical condition. Both were formed at the Academy of Arts in Tirana-Hila as a student and later a professor, and Sala as part of the generation that encountered the institution at the threshold of the regime’s collapse. If Hila’s early career unfolded under the strictures of Socialist Realism and direct censorship, Sala’s began in the vacuum that followed its dissolution.