Kosovo, b. 1997

Blerta Hashani’s paintings are informed by the traditions of classical landscape, yet what they offer are not vistas but glimpses—private views of the nature surrounding her home in the Kosovar countryside. These small-scale works, painted onto wooden boards and framed by coarse jute, appear as pared-back notations: a few brushstrokes, a sketched line, a translucent wash. From these minimal elements, essential aspects of landscape emerge—volumes, contours, shifting light, and the rhythm of space. Horizon lines serve not to divide but to orient, anchoring each composition while leaving ample room for interpretation.

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Hashani’s work is not merely observational. Her practice stems from memory rather than motif and from a felt engagement with places undergoing quiet transformation. The rural imagery she revisits—fields, fragments, everyday tools—often reflects a way of life slipping from view. These are not ruins but residues, objects and gestures rendered obsolete by time yet still charged with meaning. In their decontextualised form, they hover between familiarity and estrangement.

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The jute surface, once a passive support, becomes integral to the narrative. It absorbs pigment, carries embedded marks, and often incorporates salvaged material from domestic histories—threads from her mother’s embroidery frames, for instance. Such insertions mark her paintings as sites of lived inheritance, where memory is neither fixed nor purely personal but collective, affective, and always in flux.

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Hashani’s process resembles note-taking – attentive, intuitive, and open-ended. Like someone trying to remember through drawing, she records not what is, but what flickers on the threshold of recall. Each work acts as a small act of memorisation, resisting history’s selective lens and proposing instead a poetics of partial visibility. In the silence of these sparse landscapes, what remains is not absence but trace: of touch, of labour, of lives threaded quietly into the grain of the land.