Lorena Kalaja was born in Tirana, Albania, where she graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts before moving to New York to continue her specialization and participate in the fervor of the New York art scene.
Her works investigate the delicate field of emotions, of the most sincere and profound kind that cross over the personal to become universal and, like catalysts, allow those to whom they are addres-sed to recognize and internalize them.
In a room in the Prizren fortress, a short video broadcast in a loop deals with the theme of departure in all the meaning and emotion that it evokes. A child looks eagerly over her shoulder at her favorite doll as she continus to rise into the sky until it disappears beyond a window to the rhythm of the helicopter blades, leaving the child alone in an empty room. The tension of the scene allows the concretization of emotion that comes from the disregard of the desiring gaze of the little girl doubled from that of the spectator who is in the same situation looking at the work in a dark and empty room. The same feeling of abandonment and sadness that the artist links to the experience of emigration is experienced in the first person.
Beatrice Ciampa