Albania – Women, Justice and the Law, Tirana, Albania.

October 2013
What do you make of this?
Gallery FAB Tirana, Albania.

Albanian Women; Justice and Law is composed of twelve iron sculptures, watercolours, and twelve embroideries, No more is the folly of human action towards other human more stupid than how we treat women. is is especially true when it comes to violence against them. Albania is not the only country in the world where this happens; it is universal. I obtained permission throughs TICA(AL) Art residency in October 2013 to work in a women’s prison in Tirana, Albania. Together with psychologist Jerey Adams , we in-terviewed women who were imprisoned for murdering their physically and men-tally abusive partners. In Albania there are no mitigating circumstances; you mur-der, for whatever reason, and you are incarcerated. Violence by men against women is outside the law and usually managed by the family until, that is, a death happens. eir stories are the foundation of the work. We interviewed them with questionnaires; allowed them to draw their experiences so that they told the raw truth. e nal work consist-ed of: their art work; their answers to questions about their motives and their life outside and inside prison and 12 portraits I created in wrought iron to depict the essence of the folly of what we do to women in the name of justice which, in Albania is corrupt, stupid and self-serving. e nal part of the ‘work’ was to present all the work to opinion formers, politicians and women’s groups in Tirana. We also did a lot of PR on Television and in the press. Sometime aerwards, I found out that some of the women had been freed as a re-sult of the work and the contribution of other intelectuals in the country. In a coun-try the size of Albania, this is possible but other, larger and more complicated coun-tries are much more dicult. For example, in Russian they still have not passed a law against husbands beating their wives. In many countries the women see being beaten as proof that; “he loves me”. Perhaps this is a denitive denition of the meaning of Folly,