Odeta Xheka

About

As a woman, fated to be narrated rather than be the narrator, Odeta Xheka makes art to claim her voice because art is the opposite of speechlessness. Her paintings, collages and digital art projects have been juried into national and international competitions. Her artwork is also featured in various art magazines and literary journals. Born in Berat, Albania, currently she lives in Tampa, Florida after 4 years spent studying art in Athens, Greece and another 16 years in Brooklyn, New York.

www.odetaxhekavisuals.com

Instagram: odeta_xheka_visuals

Poetics of the Body, 2022 is a mixture of pre-cut shapes, lace, paint, and re-appropriations of my own work, typically in the form of shallow relief construction, pasted and layered together to create shading and multilayered structure so the audience could feel as if they are not in front of a collage but rather walking through a memory, peeping under the layers, squinting in an effort to notice the half hidden shapes, impatiently separating the colors from the texture, reassessing the hints as truths. Each mark, crease, and indentation is meticulously chosen to impose - has Didion has it, perfectly, in The White Album - “a narrative line upon disparate images” which have the viewers mirrored back to themselves thus facilitating the dissemblance of constructs of the past in an effort to build a future that accommodates shifting perspectives from which the human body can be perceived, experienced and represented.