Alban Muja’s new video installation entitled Family Album (2019) digs deep into personal and collective memories of the Kosovo War (1998–1999) interrogating the role that images and the media have in constructing and shaping narrative, identity and history, especially in times of conflict. Last year marked the twentieth anniversary of the end of the armed conflict in Kosovo, the last war to have been fought on European soil in the 20th century and in the continent’s youngest country, which saw 90 percent of its population displaced during the fighting. Family Album commemorates these historical events, but also opens up a wider field of questioning about the relationship between aesthetics and politics, between subject and narrator.
At the starting point of Muja’s project lies a selection of photographs of child refugees taken during the war, images that were published in newspapers and on news sites around the world, and which became synonymous with the war, emblematic of the chaos, trauma and pain communicated to the public by the global media. 20 years on, Muja tracks down the individuals, now adults, captured in these frames to delve both into the way in which the ensuing images act as carriers of personal memory and in how they helped craft a wider political and media story beyond the control of the subjects represented. Alban Muja represented the Republic of Kosovo at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019 with this project.