Edi Hila: A Tent on the Roof of a Car

We are living in the times of people’s displacement from the south to the north. Emigration is an indicator of great contradictions and differences that exist between these two worlds. In the cycle “A Tent on the Roof of a Car”, there is a reflection taking place about the Tent as the world’s oldest house, considering it as moving architecture; similarly to the car, it is also an object in motion. For the sake of this functional similarity, the metaphor of the tent on the car remains organically connected to the idea of migratory movement. Whereas the tent comes from antiquity in the form of “poetic” thinking, the new aesthetic cannot be anything else but that of the car. Attempting to achieve the highest standards of perfection, Le Corbusier compared the Parthenon to a 1921 sports car. While in the new migratory reality, the Tent comes as a suggestion of a new way of life, as a temporary, unsustainable solution, always in motion.

EDI HILA

from: “Edi Hila”, eds. Joanna Mytkowska, Kathrin Rhomberg, Erzen Shkololli. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2020

A Tent on the Roof of a Car, 2017 from the series “A Tent on the Roof of a Car”, oil on canvas, 125 × 220 cm

Icy Tent, 2017 from the series “A Tent on the Roof of a Car”, oil on canvas, 110 × 210 cm

Awakening, 2017 from the series “A Tent on the Roof of a Car”, oil on canvas, 114.5 × 208 cm

Open Door, 2017 from the series “A Tent on the Roof of a Car”, oil on canvas, 148 × 200 cm

Witness, 2016–2017 from the series “A Tent on the Roof of a Car”, oil on canvas, 147 × 196 cm

Newcomers, 2017 from the series “A Tent on the Roof of a Car”, oil on canvas, 135 × 238 cm

Discovery, 2017 from the series “A Tent on the Roof of a Car”, oil on canvas, 139 × 212 cm

Edi Hila is one of the most important Eastern European artists of his generation. Born in 1944 in Shkodra, he today lives and works in Tirana. In 1972 Hila was banned from working as an artist because of his painting “Planting of Trees” and sentenced to re-education at a chicken farm at the outskirts of Tirana. There he secretly documented his observations with drawings. Starting from the 1990s Hila attended more to painting, which was very much influenced by his visits to Florence and the art of the Italian Renaissance. He primarily works in series, whose topics he carefully selects and that are often depicting the sociopolitical transformations in Albania after the fall of the regime of Enver Hoxha.

The series “A Tent on the Roof of a Car” from the Kontakt Collection was part of the monographic exhibition of works by Edi Hila, presented at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw from 2 March to 6 May 2018 and at Tirana’s National Gallery of Arts from 24 May to 29 July 2018, as well as the Edi Hila exhibition Der Klang der Tuba at the Vienna Secession from 18 September 2020 to 7 February 2021. kontakt-collection.org