Columbia University in the City of New York

The Harriman Institute Presents

An infinite archive

Elidor Mëhilli

Photo of painting by Michel Gerard and a photograph by Marina Temkina.

 

About the Exhibit

Since the early 2000s, Elidor Mëhilli has assembled a vast archive on the dramatic transformation of his hometown, Tirana, Albania. This body of work encompasses photographic series, thousands of documents, ephemera, and found objects. While research often takes him inside formal party, state, and security police archives, this broader visual practice reimagines the idea of the archive itself.

Mëhilli’s work captures Tirana’s bewildering transition from communist-era central planning to neoliberalism. The collapse of the party-state in the early 1990s triggered a mass migration to the periphery of the city, which was ill-equipped to handle it. Ordinary residents transformed into amateur architects, converting ground floors into shops and adding illegal floors to prefabricated blocks. Various governments have tried to dominate the city, but Tirana tends to defy them, pursuing an unruled life.

As tourism surges today, star architects flock to the capital to design gleaming high-rises. The construction craze and the steep rise in real estate prices puts immense pressure on historical landmarks located on valuable land. In this heady rush to attract money and attention—to reinvent a city and a country so that it becomes legible to the West—what to do with versions of the past deemed unmarketable?

In a process that began with earlier shows at galleries at Cornell University (2005) and Princeton University (2007), Mëhilli explores this ongoing tug-of-war. He tracks the transformation of familiar places of his teenage years, like the raw graffitied façade of a housing block that served as a backdrop to a playground and a mysterious kiosk stuffed with old books that has somehow survived the decades of turmoil. He assembles textual and visual biographies of erased architecture, documents the denials to his requests for access to classified archival files, collects “obsolete history” discarded along city streets, and writes editorials for local papers, putting together a counter-archive to a country struggling with its past and desperate to plug itself into global circuits of capital.

A limited-edition book accompanies the exhibit.

An exhibit opening reception will take place on March 25, 2025 at 6:00 pm. Learn more >>

About the Artist

Elidor Mëhilli was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harriman Institute (2011-2012) and is Associate Professor at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of “From Stalin to Mao: Albania and the Socialist World,” the winner of three prizes and recently translated into Albanian. He received a Ph.D. from Princeton. At Columbia, he periodically teaches a popular seminar on Eastern Europe seen through Cold War archives. More of his work can be seen at www.elidormehilli.com.

 

Hours

Monday–Friday, 9:00 AM–5:00 PM
March 25, 2025 through May 16, 2025

Location

Harriman Institute Atrium
420 W 118th St, 12th Floor
New York, NY 10027

Visitor Information

Please note that all attendees must follow Columbia’s COVID-19 Policies and Guidelines. Columbia University is committed to protecting the health and safety of its community.

Registration and government ID are required to visit the exhibit. Please email harriman@columbia.edu no later than 48 hrs before entry to register.

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