Alban Muja: Besa

Videostill from Alban Muja, Besa, 2019, 6:50 min., Video

- selected by Inke Arns (HMKV) -

In Besa, one of the three stories forming the core of Alban Muja’s video installation Family Album, Besa Luta recounts the powerful and deeply personal narrative behind one of the most iconic photographs of the Kosovo War. The image, which circulated widely in international media in 1999, became a symbol of the Kosovar refugee crisis. It shows her mother, Sherife Luta, breastfeeding six-month-old Besa while walking, alongside thousands of others—towards the border crossing at Bllace, Macedonia, fleeing an attack by Serbian forces on the town of Kaçanik.

Revisiting this harrowing journey, Besa reconstructs her mother’s one-month-long struggle to keep her infant daughter alive amid the violence of war and the ethnic cleansing campaign that unfolded between March 8 and April 9, 1999. One moment stands out vividly in the family's collective memory: as they neared Bllace, Sherife realized she could no longer hear her baby’s voice and feared that Besa had died from the cold. A fellow refugee placed the baby inside an oven in a nearby house to warm her. Besa soon began to cry much to her mother’s relief.

Told through the lens of her parents’ memories and her own reflection, Besa’s story is both deeply personal and widely representative of the refugee experience. It reveals the trauma, resilience, and intimate sacrifices made in the face of war, while also examining how such moments shape identity and the sense of self in the years that follow.

Presented at the Kosovo Pavilion during the 58th Venice Biennale, Besa was part of Muja’s video installation Family Album. The project marked the twentieth anniversary of the end of the Kosovo War—the final conflict on European soil in the 20th century, which displaced over 90% of Kosovo's population.

At its core, Family Album investigates the intersection of personal and collective memory. Muja revisits widely circulated photographs of child refugees taken during the war—images that became visual symbols of chaos, trauma, and human suffering. Two decades later, he tracks down the individuals portrayed in those photographs, now adults, to explore how these media representations shaped their lives. The installation interrogates the power of images in constructing historical narratives, challenging the roles of subject, witness, and storyteller.

Through Besa and the wider Family Album project, Muja invites reflection on how memory—personal and political, endures, transforms, and continues to shape our understanding of conflict and survival.

 

Alban Muja

Alban Muja (b. 1980, Mitrovica) is a Kosovan contemporary artist and filmmaker based in Berlin and Prishtina. Influenced primarily by the social, political, and economic transformation processes in the wider surrounding region, he investigates history and socio-political themes, linking them to his position in Kosovo today. In 2019, Muja represented the Pavilion of the Republic of Kosovo at the 58th Venice Biennale with his three-channel moving image project Family Album. Selected other shows include: 75^th Berlinale (Forum Expanded),  Art Encounters Biennial, Timișoara, Romania; Manifesta Biennale 14, Prishtina; Ludwig Museum, Budapest; MAXXI Museum, Rome; 3rd Industrial Art Biennial, Istria, Croatia; MOMus Experimenta Center for the Arts, Thessaloniki; Kumu Art Museum, Tallinn; Guangdong Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Skopje; MeetFactory, Prague; Forum Stadtpark, Graz; James Gallery, New York; City Art Gallery, Ljubljana; Zhejiang Art Museum, Hangzhou; Museum of Fine Art, Split; Trieste Contemporanea; Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Rijeka; Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw; 2nd Biennial of Contemporary Art in the Atomic Shelter, Konjic, BiH; Škuc Gallery, Ljubljana; National Gallery of Kosovo; Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills; Slovak National Gallery; Staatliche Kunsthalle, Baden-Baden; 28th Ljubljana Graphic Biennale; nGbK, Berlin; National Gallery of Arts, Tirana; and Cetinje Biennale, among others.