Iva Lulashi

In her artistic practice, Iva Lulashi explores the intersections of politics and personal freedom using desire as the central point of her investigations. Her visual language draws inspiration from various sources such as films, documentaries, advertisements, television broadcasts, and personal photographs. Lulashi's paintings often juxtapose elements of communist propaganda, such as group sport activities with pornographic and religious imagery creating distinctive although ambiguous visual narratives. She often draws inspiration from the visual culture of communist Albania and above all, the concept of censorship.

Her painting style has subtle traits, a delicate sfumato, almost “out of focus”, which enables the contemplation of the power of images and of the medium of painting itself, freeing it from documentary significance and from references to reality. Offering a privileged point of view – almost voyeuristic – to the viewer. She tries to develop a creative and strongly ethical and political pictorial process that mutates into an aesthetic strategy aimed at a critique of the pervasive amount of images served by the mass media that drown our attention daily. Each painting, often organized in series, is a testimony of a fight against the visual stereotypes presented by the media. At the same time, she denounces the control and brainwashing that the political and economic power has on the personal sphere, whether it pertains to thought, gender, morals, customs, or behaviors.

Iva Lulashi was born in 1988 in Tirana, Abania. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice in 2016. Lulashi represented Albania at the 60th Venice Biennale with her exhibition Love as a Glass of Water in 2024. She currently lives and works in Milan, Italy.