Kristian Zara
Kristian Zara works across painting, sculpture, video, mixed media, and writing to explore identity as something fluid, negotiated, and marked by memory. He was raised in Elbasan, Albania, in a family shaped by displacement: grandparents from a semi-nomadic shepherding culture forced to the city under dictatorship; a grandfather imprisoned for politics; relatives barred from university. While his home life centered on day-to-day survival, a parallel lineage of making ran deep—women in the family produced wool goods and qilim carpets from scratch. As a child Zara watched wool cleaned, dyed, spun, and woven on the tezjah; that process imprinted his sense of color, form, and material transformation.
At eleven he learned Elbasan had a high school devoted to drawing, painting, and sculpture and insisted on pursuing fine art despite limited means. He studied at the Onufri Artistic High School (2000–2004), then at the Athens School of Fine Arts (painting core, with sculpture, stage design, photography; parallel study in Art & Psychoanalytical Approaches). Work in theater—the National Opera of Greece among others—taught him how disciplines interweave. In 2016 he began a second MFA, Art, Society & Publics at the University of Dundee, expanding his research through creative writing and theory. Jung, Steiner, Watts, Bergson, Bachelard, and artists from Man Ray and Beuys to Auerbach and Schiele continue to inform his approach.
Zara’s practice has moved from classicism through expressionism and abstraction to a concept-driven language where medium serves the subject. Notebooks—filled with observations, fragments, and perceptions—seed works that often begin in drawing before shifting into larger forms. He alternates periods of research and analysis with periods of making; at the end of a body of work he writes the “philosophy” that emerged through the process.
Themes & Motifs
Current work centers on the self and persona, with symbolism from alchemical traditions. Motifs surface as architectures, spectral figures, filamented trees—forms that hold both fragility and persistence, absence and support. The aim is not proclamation but invitation: works as open sites where viewers encounter parts of themselves. The outer is treated as mirror of the inner; material carries memory.
Site & Society
Environment is catalyst. The Present Past (2023–2024), a permanent sculptural installation at the former political prison of Spaç, confronts Albania’s unresolved history—erasure, inherited trauma, and a culture still negotiating the afterimage of authoritarian rule. The piece reclaims memory through sculpture, proposing reflection and quiet resistance.
Process
Days begin with coffee and a slow re-entry—looking at what’s already in motion, then following sketches into the larger work. Sometimes the studio holds him late into the night; sometimes he steps away to earn a living in other jobs. Low-inspiration periods are met with reading, research, or deliberate rest—pauses that reset the work rather than avoid it.
Position
For Zara, success is each step toward understanding who you are. Recognition has its place, but it is not the engine. He remains wary of trends, trusting changes that arrive from the inside rather than from noise. The throughline is necessity: making as a lived inquiry.
Upcoming
Self in Flux (Aug 10, 2025–Jan 2026) is a multidisciplinary project in sculpture, painting, video, and textual gesture, drawing from psychology, alchemy, and cultural memory to trace shifting boundaries between persona and shadow—how trauma and transformation inscribe themselves into form. The project culminates in a public exhibition (updates via his website). Self in Flux is funded by Swiss Cultural Fund Albania.
