A journey through memory and loss: Jutta Benzenberg’s Tirana exhibition

The exhibition “Don’t Look Back at the Burning House” by German photographer Jutta Benzenberg continues to attract public attention at the temporary Heinrich Böll Stiftung Gallery Pavilion in Skanderbeg Square, offering a powerful artistic journey through Albania’s post-communist transition, a period marked by economic instability, mass migration, and social fragmentation.

Why is this important: Organized in cooperation with the EU Delegation to Albania and the German Embassy, the exhibition revisits Benzenberg’s photographic archive from the early 1990s, an intimate portrayal of daily life during Albania’s turbulent years of change. Many of the original negatives were destroyed in a 2006 fire that wiped out nearly 90 percent of her work. Together with curator Olsi Hoxha, Benzenberg later transformed the burnt negatives into new visual works that exist between documentary and art.

Structured in three chapters, the exhibition presents portraits and scenes from the 1990s transition, collages created from surviving fragments of her archive, and, for the first time, the scorched negatives themselves, displayed as artistic testimonies of memory and loss. The works are also featured in Benzenberg’s new photobook “Don’t Look Back at the Burning House”, launched alongside the exhibition.

Minister of Tourism, Culture and Sports Blendi Gonxhja described the exhibition as “an invitation to look beyond material loss and to discover how art can reemerge as both a personal narrative and a mirror of a nation’s shared history.”

The exhibition is open daily, free of charge, from 10:00 to 20:30 at the HBS Pavilion in Skanderbeg Square, offering visitors a profound reflection on resilience, remembrance, and artistic rebirth.