Rooted in folkloric traditions of storytelling and the art of diasporic survival, the studio embraces and breaks form to prioritize and share stories from marginal in-between spaces. The studio has been working on collaborative community projects focused in diaspora and in the Balkans, but the artist is currently considering becoming a born-again painter.
ZAJMI’s work has appeared at Bulevard Art and Media Institute in Tirana, in Ouroboros and Blindspotting by Image Text Ithaca Press, in the Diaspora Issue of No, Dear Magazine, in two issues of O Gocë, at the Essex Flowers Gallery in New York City, in the Baklava and Beats show at the Aperture Foundation, and more.
A STUDIO IS A SPACE FOR KEEPING
MEMORY & SCULPTING THE PRESENT
curated by VALENTINA BONIZZI and SILVI NAÇI
exhibiting artists: EBBA ZAJMI, URESA AHMETI, LEDIA DUSHI, VA-BENE ELIKEM FIATSI, BIMBI aka ANGEL HUBRIS, ARLINDA MORINA (LIKI), BASHARD MURAD, and THE QUEER MUSLIM PROJECT
[19 May 2025]
EBBA ZAJMI will exhibit a work called FUTURING: AN AMERICAN TRIPTYCH in this show. The work is a trio of still-life images of living documents, in which the artist is working with memory materials and ephemera collected from a migration story starting in August of 2000. After building and living with an altar dedicated to the objects that tracked ZAJMI’s family in diaspora, the artist dismantled the altar and rearranged what they call the “memory keepers” of their family’s American dream.
FUTURING: AN AMERICAN TRIPTYCH was formed while contending with the disillusion of immigration, state and family mythologies, rituals and patterns, and fragile futures.
LULE MAJI: A RESERVOIR OF CARE, LOVE, REBELLION is the fourth edition organized and produced by BULEVARD ART & MEDIA INSTITUTE in partnership with ALEANDA LGBTQI, HOMESPACE, and SEKHMET INSTITUTE.
editorial design by EBBA ZAJMI
[02 December 2024]
The booklet is available with a purchase of the album on Bandcamp. You can listen to the album on all streaming services, and you can view the video album on YouTube.
editorial and editorial design by EBBA ZAJMI
[28 November 2024]
Previously edited with STUDIO ZAJMI for the story’s premiere as an audio performance featured on MONTEZ PRESS RADIO, this new rendition comes back to Albania in the form of a photo book. ANGEL HUBRIS ponders prey and prayer, capital and cruelty and country, homecoming and horror, ritual and remains, bells and burial.
New York City launch and distribution details are coming soon. While you’re waiting, catch ANGEL HUBRIS at performances across NYC to snag a special copy before our official NYC launch.
workshop created and facilitated by EBBA ZAJMI at BULEVARD ART AND MEDIA INSTITUTE
[30 November 2024]
This ekphrastic writing workshop welcomed writers and visual artists alike for an interdisciplinary approach to fighting writer’s block, forming photo books, or keeping personal archives. Individuals were invited to bring images from their working portfolio or their personal archives. Participants worked with these images to produce writing that offered a sensory narrative, a context, or a subjectivity.
The workshop ended with a discussion based seminar of sharing work, offering feedback, and revealing images.
I think it was Carmen Winant who called herself a photographer who no longer made pictures, and I felt the same. I moved away from image-making, ironically as I entered an MFA in Image Text, but the image was still central to my work even though I was no longer eager about making new ones. The particular history of the Albanian photograph was an inspiration here too, with the Marubi archives and Hoxha’s habits of erasure being two primary points of center.
The opportunity to create space for writing with images to an international group of artists, writers, and other practitioners in creative fields was incredibly moving.
workshop created and facilitated by EBBA ZAJMI at KURIMANZUTTO GALLERY
[19 October 2024]
For the third and last workshop of this series, ZHGARRAVINA (SCRIBBLE), EBBA ZAJMI invited participants to engage in mark-making, starting with an in-depth look at the scribbles in the work on view in the gallery.
From identifying and naming figures, words, and marks on the school desks to the sculptures PETRIT HALILAJ extracted from them, participants are guided through making their marks and creating collectively authored broadsheets.
Having been enamored with the memories that PETRIT’s work about the abetare conjured for me, I began to realize that I’d secretly been in community with so many other Albanians who scribbled into their abetare books. This brought me back to a central theme in my own work—the collective histories of mark-making and publishing for Albanians. Though I share a Kosovar ancestry with the artist, it is a generation or two removed, so my parents and grandparents were direct subjects of the Hoxha regime. During that regime, the broadside was specifically encouraged to be used as a tactic of social surveillance and shame. I wanted to link that history with the human urge towards mark-making and invite my guests—who were a mixture of Albanian and non-Albanian speakers—to subvert that history and make collectively authored broadsides linked to memory, language, or play.
an image lyric essay by EBBA ZAJMI
[Fall 2024]
image and text by EBBA ZAJMI
[FALL 2022]
It was printed in Venice by GRAFICHE VENEZIANE, edited with TONYA FOSTER, NICHOLAS MUELLNER, and CATHERINE TAYLOR, and launched at the PRINTED MATTER ART BOOK FAIR.
images and text by EBBA ZAJMI
[SUMMER 2022]
Fed on pattern, inheritance, transformation and the inexpressible, the snake eats itself. The beginning is the end is the beginning. Suggested usage: four drops daily. A sensation of warmth is normal.