Lala Meredith-Vula (born 1966) is an English and Albanian Kosovian artist and photographer. In 1988 she was included in the Damien Hirst-led Freeze exhibition. Lala is a professor at De Montfort University, Leicester.
Lala Meredith-Vula (born 1966) is an English and Albanian Kosovian artist and photographer. In 1988 she was included in the Damien Hirst-led Freeze exhibition. Lala is a professor at De Montfort University, Leicester.
Lala Meredith-Vula was born in Sarajevo and moved to England in 1970. She attended Trent University, Nottingham (1984–85) and Goldsmiths College (1985–88), then the University of Priština, Kosovo, for postgraduate studies.
In 1988, she was one of the exhibitors in the exhibition Freeze , organised by Damien Hirst which showcased the work of many of the artists who were later to become known as the Young British Artists. Since then Lala has exhibited widely internationally and was recently part of the 2017 Documenta 14 exhibition.
From 1989, she has lectured at various colleges in the United Kingdom, United States and Kosovo. In 1995, she set up the first photography department at the University of Tirana, Albania, and in 2000 a photography department at Priština University.
A particularly significant experience for Meredith-Vula was a series of photographs in Kosovo showing haystacks built by Albanian farmers. The juxtaposition of her cosmopolitan art experience with her provincial origin, asking the question "What is art?", provided a resolution of the two:
Having studied art for many years and visited many galleries throughout the world I soon found that the context of a work of art played a major part on where it is placed. For all my research, it took my returning home to discover the real significance of my search, it was in the fields of my former home town that I witnessed a way of life as old as the land itself where farmers went about their business, everything had its place. Within all this, I saw that somehow the farmers were unconsciously creating strange, sculptures that had the presence of modern sculptural pieces. Here part of my search was over. I had found the meeting place between my new world of art, being an artist, and my past, in the landscape of Kosova. [1]
She has also photographed women in Turkish baths over a two-year period (6 months of which was gaining permission), and a series showing women standing and moving beneath the surface of water. She has explained this:
Her work can be found in a range of major art collections including, but not limited to: Arts Council of Britain, Arthur Andersen Collection, Centre of Photography in Geneva, Collezione La Gaia, Doria Pamphilj Gallery Collection, Doria Pamphilj Palace Museum, The Teseco Foundation, The British Council Collection.
Lala now lectures at De Montfort University in Leicester
Lala has been photographing farmers' haystacks in Eastern Europe since 1989. An on-going series that has been exhibited at the Photographer's Gallery, London, Croatian Fine Art Society, Zagreb, Kosova Art Gallery, Kosova, documenta 14 in Kassel and Marubi Museum, Albania.[ citation needed ]
Lala followed and photographed the Blood Feud Reconciliation movement in Kosova in 1990 and 1991 making a series of photographs shown in Kosova Art Gallery in 2015. She was researcher on a BBC documentary film Under the Sun (1991) - Broadcast in 1992 on BBC 1
 | This section of a biography of a living person does not include any references or sources .(October 2012) |
Flora Brovina is a Kosovar Albanian poet, pediatrician and women's rights activist. She was born in the town of Skenderaj in the Drenica Valley of Kosovo, and was raised in Pristina, where she went to school and began studying medicine. After finishing her university studies in Zagreb, where she specialized in pediatrics, she returned to Kosovo and worked for a time as a journalist for the Albanian-language daily newspaper Rilindja. Soon thereafter, she returned to the health care profession and worked for many years in the Pediatrics Ward of the Pristina General Hospital.
The Young British Artists, or YBAs—also referred to as Brit artists and Britart—is a loose group of visual artists who first began to exhibit together in London in 1988. Many of the YBA artists graduated from the BA Fine Art course at Goldsmiths, in the late 1980s, whereas some from the group had trained at Royal College of Art.
Damien Steven Hirst is an English artist and art collector. He is one of the Young British Artists (YBAs) who dominated the art scene in the UK during the 1990s. He is reportedly the United Kingdom's richest living artist, with his wealth estimated at US$384 million in the 2020 Sunday Times Rich List. During the 1990s his career was closely linked with the collector Charles Saatchi, but increasing frictions came to a head in 2003 and the relationship ended.
The Saatchi Gallery is a London gallery for contemporary art and an independent charity opened by Charles Saatchi in 1985. Exhibitions which drew upon the collection of Charles Saatchi, starting with US artists and minimalism, moving to the Damien Hirst-led Young British Artists, followed by shows purely of painting, led to Saatchi Gallery becoming a recognised authority in contemporary art globally. It has occupied different premises, first in North London, then the South Bank by the River Thames, and finally in Chelsea, Duke of York's HQ, its current location. In 2019 Saatchi Gallery became a registered charity and began a new chapter in its history. Recent exhibitions include the major solo exhibition of the artist JR, JR: Chronicles, and London Grads Now in September 2019 lending the gallery spaces to graduates from leading fine art schools who experienced the cancellation of physical degree shows due to the pandemic.
Freeze is the title of an art exhibition that took place in July 1988 in an empty London Port Authority building at Surrey Docks in London Docklands. Its main organiser was Damien Hirst. It was significant in the subsequent development of the Young British Artists.
The Doria Pamphilj Gallery is a large private art collection housed in the Palazzo Doria Pamphilj in Rome, Italy, between Via del Corso and Via della Gatta. The principal entrance is on the Via del Corso. The palace façade on Via del Corso is adjacent to a church, Santa Maria in Via Lata. Like the palace, it is still privately owned by the princely Roman family Doria Pamphili. Tours of the state rooms often culminate in concerts of Baroque and Renaissance music, paying tribute to the setting and the masterpieces it contains.
Candida Höfer is a German photographer. She is a former student of Bernd and Hilla Becher. Like other Becher students, Höfer's work is known for technical perfection and a strictly conceptual approach. From 1997 to 2000, she taught as professor at the Hochschule für Gestaltung, Karlsruhe. Höfer is the recipient of the 2018 Outstanding Contribution to Photography award, as part of the Sony World Photography awards. She is based in Cologne.
Abigail Lane is an English artist who works in photography, wax casting, printing and sound. Lane was one of the exhibitors in the 1988 Damien Hirst-led Freeze exhibition—a mixed show of art which was significant in the development of the later-to-be YBA scene of art.
Burim Myftiu is an Albanian American contemporary photographer.
Zarina Bhimji is a Ugandan Indian photographer, based in London. She was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2007, exhibited at Documenta 11 in 2002, and is represented in the public collections of Tate, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and Moderna Museet in Stockholm.
Meredith Joy Ostrom is an American actress. She graduated from the New York University Tisch School of the Arts where she got her BFA degree with a double major in Drama and Fine arts with a minor in Cinema Studies. After graduation she moved to London. She was linked for years to Duran Duran's Nick Rhodes.
Henry Bond, FHEA is an English writer, photographer, and visual artist. In his Lacan at the Scene (2009), Bond made contributions to theoretical psychoanalysis and forensics.
Esat Valla is a Kosovar Albanian painter noted for his figurative paintings of small animals or insects such as butterflies and birds.
This is a list of some of the major festivals and events held in Kosovo's capital city Pristina, which are common occurrences throughout the year in the city.
As the capital city of Kosovo, Pristina is the heart of the cultural and artistic development of all Albanians that live in Kosovo. The department of cultural affairs is just one of the segments that arranges the cultural events, which make Pristina one of the cities with the most emphasized cultural and artistic traditions.
The National Gallery of Kosovo, formerly known as the Kosova National Art Gallery, is an art gallery situated at The University of Pristina Campus that focuses on 20th-century art.
Historical monuments in Pristina are made up of 21 monuments out of a total of 426 protected monuments all over Kosovo. A large number of these monuments date back to the Byzantine and Ottoman periods. Since 1945, the Yugoslav authorities followed the idea of constructing a modern Pristina by relying in the urban development motto “destroy the old, build the new” and this resulted with major changes in the structure of the buildings, their function and their surrounding environment. However, numerous types of monuments have been preserved, including four mosques, a restored orthodox church, an Ottoman bath, a public fountain, a clock tower, several traditional houses as well as European-influenced architecture buildings such as the Museum of Kosovo. These symbolize the historical and cultural character of Pristina as it was developed throughout centuries in the spirit of conquering empires.
Visar Mulliqi is an impressionist and expressionist painter of Kosovo.
Musë Prelvukaj is a Kosovar artist born in Martinovići, near Gusinje and Plav in what is now Montenegro, on December 25, 1950.
Ledri Vula is a Kosovo-Albanian rapper, singer and songwriter.
