Tirana to honour victims of communism with new monument

TIRANA, Dec. 1 – A design project created by Athens-based Albanian artist Ilirian Shima has been announced the winner of a competition to select a monument dedicated to the victims of communism in Albania.
Shima’s winning work is a “Chain,” a symbol representing imprisonment and isolation of Albanians for five decades under communism until the early 1990s. “The stretching of the chains transmits the people’s tension even after their breaking-up so that this situation is memorized. The metal feeling allows us to feel the burden, the handcuffs’ grip and their coldness,” says the jury. Shima’s work was selected out of 20 design projects submitted to build a monument dedicated to victims of communism at the garden in front of the National Museum of History in the Tirana city centre.
A thorough look into one of the world’s harshest communist regimes has also been recently put online through data, pictures, videos and personal stories in the first online Museum of Memory dedicated to the 45-year communist regime led by Stalinist dictator Enver Hoxha.
“Small Albania during the dictatorship had 23 prisons and 48 internment camps. Some 6,535 were imprisoned and executed during the communist. Albanians served 914,000 years of prison and 256,146 years of internment under communism, which more than 10 millennia. The psychiatric ward in the city of Elbasan served to treat the regime’s political opponents with the therapy of clearing memory, depersonalisation and losing the sense of reality,” says the muzeuimemories.info website.
Earlier this year, forty works by renowned Athens-based Albanian sculptor Ilirian Shima created during the past two decades were displayed in his first exhibition at the National Arts Gallery in Tirana.
The sculptor named his exhibition Farajon after a 2014 bronze sculpture dedicated to his love for Albania and his Albanian origin. In his Farajon exhibition, Shima was inspired by the image of a 4,000-year-old Illyrian earring, creating male genitals which he describes as the great reproductive ability of the Albanian people.
Ilirian Shima is known for his artworks in the inner premises of some institutions in Athens and home decorations.
A sculptor with great capabilities on creating figures and other shapes out of marble, wood, clay and iron, Shima was born in 1964 in Tirana. He graduated in sculpture from the University of Art in Tirana in 1989. Since then, he has participated in dozens of exhibitions in Albania and Greece.