The choice of Tirana as the opening venue was not accidental. "Tirana was not simply the next destination for this exhibition, but part of its very concept," says Albana Ejupi.

The exhibition includes around 25 works, paintings, sculptures and installations, bringing together painting, sculpture, textile and text. The main novelty of this exhibition is the "Blues" cycle, which shifts the focus from the physical body to the emotional body in the digital age.

"Intimacy is not treated as a personal story, but as a social and political condition," says Ejupi, explaining that in several of the paintings the canvas itself functions as a screen, displaying fragments of messages and interrupted phrases such as "Social media killed romance" or "Where is the love that you promised?", text which, according to her, does not explain the image but interrupts it, creating tension between language and figure.

For the first time, this exhibition also presents a monumental sculpture weighing around 300 kilograms, built entirely from sand. 

"It was important that the woman's body is not presented as something fragile or decorative, but as a presence with weight, not only the physical weight of the material, but also that of history, memory and the roles society places upon the body. The sculpture looks as if it is being born from the sand itself," directly reflecting the exhibition's central idea: that the body is never a finished form.

The title "Body Under Construction" itself stems precisely from this conviction. "We are never born finished," says Ejupi. 

"Throughout our lives, we are built by our family, by the place where we grow up, by the history we inherit, by loves, losses, memories." For her, identity has no final moment of completion; we are constantly "under construction." 

Through materials such as sand, textiles, plaster, and cement, she seeks to make this very process visible, treating the body not as an ideal object but as a space where history, society, and personal experience leave their marks.

She connects her artistic practice to her doctoral research at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, where she studies how women artists from the Balkans have used material as a form of resistance against patriarchal structures.

The central material in her work is sand, an element traditionally associated with construction and the post-war economy in the region, work historically attributed to men. Ejupi takes this material out of its usual context and, instead of building walls, builds bodies: 

"precisely those bodies that have often been left out of the histories these structures have built."

 She explains that the works gain an additional layer of meaning when they meet an audience that knows the history and social dynamics that produced them closely.

The technical realisation of this exhibition was not easy. Most of the works are monumental in scale and require careful packing and transport, while the biggest challenge was the 300-kilogram sculpture itself, which was transported and assembled in collaboration with the specialised Austrian team Kunsttrans, she says. 

"After every exhibition, the public sees only the result, but behind it lies an extraordinarily large logistical and technical effort," she stresses.

 

The artist says she is happy with the reception she received in Albania, particularly because the responses did not stop at the aesthetic dimension but extended to discussions of the concept and the material. "Many have pointed out that the exhibition has brought 'a high conceptual and spatial standard' to the presentation of contemporary art. And art is not measured only by the number of visitors, but by the dialogue it manages to create," says Ejupi. When the public stops, reflects and keeps talking about the work even after leaving the gallery, "I feel that the work has continued its life beyond the exhibition space."

The exhibition has also opened new contacts with institutions, curators and collectors, both in Albania and abroad, collaborations not yet formalised, but which the artist sees as "the first step toward future projects." Kosovo, she says, remains always a priority: "it is the place I come from and where my artistic journey began." She is currently in talks about various projects, hoping that concrete collaborations will soon take shape there as well, as a continuation of a dialogue she considers an important part of her artistic practice.