“Mara is the visionary Albanian collector I haven’t met yet” says Lisja Tërshana, curator and co-founder of Khrais – Tërshana, an art dealership and production studio connecting London, Tirana, and Krakow. They temporarily activated the historically loaded site Vila 31 x Art Explora to launch the Mara as a concept that aims to nurture a collector culture in Albania and publicly celebrate the type of taste, dedication, and long-term support that builds artist careers. “It’s a public declaration of taste and of what type of works you want to be seen supporting. I also liked the tension of hosting a free-market art auction in a space once defined by censorship”.
“When we curated the exhibition, I chose artists whose practices exemplify the kind of early-phase conviction Mara seeks to educate and reward”, Tërshana adds. As such, the featured artists are thoughtfully selected to showcase the richness and diversity of contemporary practice today.
The exhibition unites emerging and established talents from Albania, Kosovo, and beyond, each offering a unique visual language and conceptual rigour. Every work has been chosen for its ability to thrive in a private collection while also engaging with broader critical and institutional conversations. The selection encompasses a variety of media and approaches, appealing equally to first-time collectors and experienced patrons, and encourages all viewers to begin or deepen their exploration of contemporary art.
Here are ten carefully selected artists who were selected in Mara worth keeping an eye on.
Blerta Hashani
Kosovo-born and based artist, Blerta Hashani (b. 1997), takes great inspiration from classical landscape painting, presenting private views of the nature around her countryside home. Working across painting, drawing, and photography, Hashani explores the ideas of mysticism and symbolism. As such, her art is often experimental and minimalistic, with lines like an anchor still leaving much to imagination.
The works reflect the routine and natural environment surrounding the artist. “The canvas becomes a visualisation of her memory, where the experienced takes shape; a place for impressions of an ambient that remains subjective despite its generalisation”, writes a curator, Vanessa Joan Müller. “She is the mirror that reflects the information she gathers, the sensations she feels, and the transformations she experiences”.
Edyta Olszewska
Exploring the plasticity of light and darkness, a Polish painter and “creator of objects”, Edyta Olszewska, enforces the contrast – visually and theoretically. In her work, she focuses on the intersection of sacred and erotic, Christian iconography and contemporary Internet culture, sacrum and profanum. “I aim for a complete intermingling of these worlds, where the sacred and the ‘impure’ take on identical form”, she says.
She combines extreme motifs, which she emphasises with contrasting colours and the play of light and shadow – a combination of baroque tenebrism and opulence, with pop culture elements as glittery, oversaturated imagery. Often basing her research on the representation of female archetypes, Olszewska sensitively marries seemingly drastically opposite worlds.
Idlir Koka
Idlir Koka’s (b. 1979) work situates itself on the intersection of material and identity through the language of surfaces. As an Albanian artist, he explores his homeland’s collective memory in soft tones and diffused brushwork, where the image is a living skin, yet an observation of how people, objects, and spaces absorb emotional and historical pressure.
“Soft and melancholic, persuasive and at times ironic”, as the curatorial text for Rear-view mirror (2023) stated. Koka’s work weaves together intimacy and distance, fragility and resilience, forming a visual space where memory takes on texture and empathy becomes tangible.
Keith Farquhar
The subtle cultural signifiers that have influenced Keith Farquhar’s (b. 1969) practice are the very elements that constitute the background rhythm of contemporary life, each offering traces of experiences he has personally engaged with or witnessed directly. The Edinburgh-based artist is fascinated by embracing the banal or the reviled to unsettle assumptions about what constitutes artistic value.
Questioning the hierarchies, Farquhar works with appropriated imagery and photographs of personal significance, produced through dye sublimation on faux fur. He explores the ways art both influences and reacts to the evolving frameworks of contemporary life – prompting reflection on how unnoticed connections, fleeting actions, and processes of undoing can illuminate larger issues within social and artistic practice.
Leonard Qylafi
Leonard Qylafi (b. 1980) is an Albanian visual artist whose practice spans painting, video, and photography. His practice is deeply rooted in personal experience and grounded in an ongoing dialogue between subjects and mediums, functioning as both research and reflection, exploring how images construct meaning and memory. As such, Qylafi has developed a body of work that examines how visual languages shape and reshape our understanding of history, identity, and perception.
While initially trained in painting, through photography and video, he captures the tension between permanence and impermanence. His approach is both analytical and poetic, using visual media to explore how architecture and urban development mirror broader social and cultural shifts in contemporary Albanian life.
Łukasz Surowiec
Łukasz Surowiec’s (b. 1985) multifaceted practice rejects easy categorisation, while being deeply embedded in his own experiences and unfolding as an interplay of research and mediation across different media. This Polish artist treats art as a tool of inquiry – installations, interventions or objects become methods to access society’s lesser-seen layers.
Surowiec’s practice is resolutely socially engaged. He frequently works with marginalised groups, embeds his art in public and non-institutional spaces, and takes up themes of memory, inequality, exclusion and the legacy of history. He breaks out of gallery confinements, often merging aesthetic, activist, and documentary modes into what might be called “research-art” that asks: what is public reality, who inhabits it, and how is it structured?
Lumturie Krasniqi
Living and working in Kosovo, Lumturie Krasniqi (b. 1997) doesn’t limit herself to painting but also uses photography, installation, and digital media to extend her practice. Her work investigates overlooked aspects of contemporary life and raises existential questions. Krasniqi’s artistic approach weaves together these connections, separations, and the tension of opposites, merging the spiritual with the emotional, exploring the relationships between soul and matter, fear and love, humanity and nature, as well as human bonds and parallel realities.
Zeni Alia
Documentary photographer and painter, Zeni Alia (b. 1994), develops all his projects in his homeland, Albania, taking the form of long-term studies of space and local phenomena. Carefully observing, following “the traces and signs left behind”, as he calls them – generational stories and traditions, as well as industry and the turbulence of post-communist dictatorship.
Being an accomplished painter, along with his photography practice, allows Alia to approach his subjects with particular flair. His exploration of the “transitions” – a word seemingly omnipresent among Albanian society and recent history – seeks to reflect that state, where “transformation is visible yet incomplete, and meaning often emerges in the subtle shifts of place and memory”.
Ben Grosse-Johannboecke
Germany-born, UK-based, Ben Grosse-Johannboecke (b. 2002) treats the idea of “exhausted image” as central to his practice, alongside what he calls “exhausted painting”. His work examines how images — particularly those with sociopolitical content — circulate endlessly, becoming detached from their original context and losing their impact.
Using digitally manipulated satellite imagery, he collages, stripes, and repeatedly repaints these images, deliberately obscuring their source while exploring the tension between representation and abstraction. Across his practice, the resulting painting-hybrids oscillate between political reference and autonomous abstraction, readability and opacity, forming intricate visual networks that probe memory, trauma, and the fragile persistence of meaning.
Mila Rae Sarabhai
Being an Indian-Japanese-British artist, Mila Rae Sarabhai (b. 2002) bases her practice within her rich heritage, drawing from colonial histories and familial archives, finding particular inspiration in South Asian art. As crucial for her is materiality and working with fabric and handmade paper; much of what she uses is sourced from her hometown in India and brought back to London.
Working primarily in photography, collage and printmaking, her practice is process-driven and rooted in experimentation and the transformation of imagery to create works that speak to a sense of memory and loss that can be both violent and longing.
