This post presents a short summary of Raino Isto’s current research project associated with LACA. It is one of a series of short biographies by the founding members of LACA, detailing their current research projects.
Broadly speaking, my research focuses on the ways that socialist monumentality developed in various contexts in Southeastern Europe during the period of late socialism (roughly the 1960s through the 1980s), and on the ways that contemporary artists respond to socialist monumental heritage in the postsocialist period. One of my current projects focuses on the ways that Socialist Realist art in the People’s Socialist Republic of Albania figured the female body, with a particular focus on sculptural production in the late 1960s and early 70s. I am particularly interested in public sculptures of women who were considered to be ‘martyrs’ for the socialist cause—because they were executed by fascist occupiers, because they were killed by anti-communist factions within Albanian society, or because they died while laboring for the ‘building of socialism’ in the country. These women were figured as sacrifices for the creation of a new form of society, and the methods by which their sacrifice were presented to the public can—I think—tell us a great deal about the stakes that inhered in the materiality of women’s bodies during socialism.
Socialist Realism has been described by some authors (cf. Christina Kiaer 2005, and 2014) as an art form that sought to create a ‘collective body,’ a social multiplicity that was unified affectively and emotionally in various ways. Others have pointed out the ways that Socialist Realism used images of gender difference to reinforce social hierarchies and solidify the emotional resonance of the leader cult (cf. Reid 1998). However, the majority of focused studies on the relationship between Socialist Realism and the gendered body have examined the 1930s in the Soviet Union. Sustained engagement with the question of the representation of gender difference in the fine arts (and even in popular culture) in non-Soviet countries, and in the late socialist period, is still lacking. Furthermore, the Albanian case has suffered from particular neglect; few studies (for example, Ikonomi and Woodcock 2014; Prifti 1975) have attempted to understand how gender was actually constructed in socialist Albania, or how the rhetoric of women’s emancipation interacted with other regimes of representation either within the country or abroad.
Andrea Mano, Fuat Dushku, Perikli Çuli, and Dhimo Gogollari, Four Heroines of Mirdita, inaugurated 1971, Rrëshen, Albania (now destroyed)
Two workers chisel the recently cast bust of one of the four heroines, in Tirana. Image from Drita, 1971.
My investigation focuses on a monument inaugurated on October 24, 1971, in the northern Albanian town of Rrëshen, commemorating the ‘Four Heroines of Mirdita.’ Marta Tarazhi, Prenda Tarazhi, Shkurte Skuraj, and Mrikë Lokja were four young women killed by anti-communist reactionaries in the north of Albania during the early years after the socialist regime took power in the country. All four of the women had played roles in the socialist project of women’s emancipation in the relatively conservative, historically Catholic Mirdita region, and likewise all four had travelled to central Albania to work on railroad construction as part of a project to integrate women living in the north into socialist life by involving them in the processes of industrial modernization. The story of their deaths became an important aspect of the narrative of women’s emancipation, a project that dictator Enver Hoxha sought to emphasize especially during the country’s Cultural Revolution (carried out in the late 1960s and early 70s). The monument to the Four Heroines, a figural ensemble created by four sculptors, was inaugurated during a period of intensified monumental construction in Albania, and the process of its creation was frequently cited as an exemplary instance of collective artistic production.
Looking to work such as Tatjana Aleksić’s (2013) analysis of the significance of sacrificed bodies for community construction in Southeastern Europe, I consider how Socialist Realist sculpture—a figurative paradigm that necessarily grappled with the proper role and relationships of bodies to each other—addressed the material, affective valences of female bodies, especially when those bodies were created by male sculptors. In addition to the Four Heroines of Mirdita monument, I examine artworks commemorating Shkurte Pal Vata—a young woman who died while working to construct a railroad in central Albania—and Bule Naipi and Persefoni Kokëdhima—two women who were killed by the Nazi occupation in Albania. I also consider the significance of these works in relation to Janaq Paço’s nudes, which the artist was famously ordered to destroy, because they represented decadent, bourgeois sensibilities. From these case studies, I work towards establishing a broader theory showing the ways that socialist artworks depicted the sacrifice of women’s bodies in ways that allowed for both the materialization and deferral of historical responsibility, narrative significance, and affective labor.
Raino Isto received his PhD in Art History from the University of Maryland, College Park. His dissertation is entitled “Monumental Endeavors: Sculpting History in Southeastern Europe, 1960–2016.” He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, working on connections between socialist monumental production and postsocialist contemporary art.
Sources:
Aleksić, Tatjana. The Sacrificed Body: Balkan Community Building and the Fear of
Freedom. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013.
Ikonomi, Luljeta, and Shannon Woodcock. “Imoraliteti në Familje: Nxitja e Ankesave të
Grave për të Përforcuar Pushtetin e Partisë në Revolucionin Kulturor Shqiptar.”
Përpjekja 32–33 (Spring 2014): 153–180.
Kiaer, Christina. “Was Socialist Realism Forced Labor? The Case of Alexandr Deineka in the 1930s.” Oxford Art Journal 28: 3 (2005): 321–345.
Kiaer, Christina. “Lyrical Socialist Realism.” October 147 (Winter 2014): 56–77.
Prifti. Peter. “The Albanian Women’s Struggle for Emancipation.” Southeastern Europe
2 (1975): 109–129.
Reid, Susan E. “All Stalin’s Women: Gender and Power in Soviet Art in the 1930s.” Slavic Review 57:1 (Spring 1998): 133–173.
Laboratory for Albanian Culture and the Arts // Laboratori për Artet dhe Kulturën Shqiptare 