Çmimi Ardhje

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Congratulations to Olsi Hoxha, the winner of the ARDHJE Award 2025!
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Olsi will participate in a two-month residency program at Residency Unlimited, New York City.

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Jury Motivation:

First, I want to say thank you; it was a pleasure to meet the four wonderful exhibiting artists today and hear more about your practices. A big thank you to Zeta Contemporary Art Center for having me as well.

I’m happy to share a little bit from the jury, which I had the pleasure of serving on today with Alban and Francesco. I’ll go artist by artist in the order we met with everyone:

Bekim Hasaj
It was great to learn more about his diverse trajectory and evolution from working with painting in an expanded sense to moving towards sculpture and performance with a focus on color, form, and surface. These all come together in his installation here, which invites visitors to participate by creating infinite compositions or patterns with his image blocks.
We found his experimentation between material object and image to be very strong, particularly the way in which he fuses photographs of landscapes and his own work to the canvas, working the material over and over until it becomes singular.
We were also very interested in the part of his practice he’s refined in Finland, creating relationships with the natural world through creative intervention, like papermaking, and how these interventions can change our perception and connections to the land, which we found to be akin to land art.

Enza Rripaj
We found her approach to treating history as an abstract form to be very strong. She considers how the historical narratives function, but does so by moving away from the orthodox approach to history and instead looks closely at the traces of what is left behind to reveal new alternative perspectives. Through various unique systems, she explores the memories and inner lives that objects hold.
We found her use of the aesthetics of conceptual art and language to be exemplary. She invites the viewer to see what is often left unseen by the way history is traditionally written.
In the same installation, Enza experiments and makes connections between a wide range of media from imprints or indexical drawings from the surface of the piano, to digital technology and pixel image data to handmade terracotta mosaic.
We appreciated her consideration of time as a form for her works, as well as the metaphors of dark and light in her practice.

Dea Shubleka
We feel Dea’s examination of the space between purity and defilement to be very strong, as she demonstrated a well-considered relationship between the abject and the sense of self within her work.
We were very interested in how the body and intimacy functioned in her work as well as the spiritual sensibility of her installation which functions also a temple or monument. We were also drawn to the imaginary characters she’s created from childhood memories, hand-sewn and stuffed to look like oversized children’s toys. We thought these sculptures were very strong, evocative and psychologically charged.
The way Dea publicly depicts rituals and personal narratives that are often only seen behind closed doors in private recalls the feminist motto “the personal is political” and the power of that statement especially in our current political climate.
It’s clear to the jury that that she has a natural instinct for making work that is physically impactful but also visceral and transgressive.

Olsi Hoxha
We thought Olsi demonstrated a solid research based practice that is coupled with an original aesthetic in his participatory sound installation. We appreciated the strong currency of knowledge he has developed around chaos theory, cybernetics, and theories of noise.
Olsi uses analog electronics to repurpose salvaged found objects that have been cast aside or disposed of. He gives them a second life as electro acoustic sculptures that are activated in exciting and unexpected ways.
In our time of artificial intelligence and algorithmic systems, finding new models of making with these electronics that can be intervened in and altered for a different purpose felt particularly important.
We also felt that the concepts of uncertainty that guide Olsi’s work and soundscape to be timely in this moment, interrupting systems in unpredictable ways.
The jury was interested in the importance of the butterfly effect in this body of work -or the role of small actions that can have a large resonance elsewhere - a concept which we felt is crucial as a counterweight living under systems of political oppression.
We found his interest in tech from the 1990s to have a strong connection to the transitional moment of massive change here in Albania after the collapse of the communist regime.

We think he could benefit tremendously from meeting with artists in the sound art, experimental music, and creative technology scene in New York City.

And with that, on behalf of myself and jury members Francesco and Alban, we’re happy to announce Olsi as the winner of the award and residency in New York.

Meet the Jury of the ARDHJE Award 2025!