Lala Meredith-Vula
Artist Talk

In the context of the exhibition Fruits of Labour, artist Lala Meredith-Vula gives an artist talk at Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens on her work in general and her series “Haystacks” in particular.

Since 1989, Meredith-Vula has photographed haystacks in different rural areas in the Balkan. These haystacks are more varied than the regular, picturesque mounds painted by Jean-François Millet or Claude Monet in the nineteenth century. Instead, human and non-human agents, farmers and animals, shaped these agrarian forms. The photographs portray age-old habits of working the land and the drastic political changes that have affected the region.

Lala Meredith-Vula (1966, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina) is an artist and professor of art and photography at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK. Born to an Albanian father and English mother, she moved to England at an early age, returning to the Balkans after graduating from Goldsmiths University in 1988.

Meredith-Vula represented Albania in the 48th Venice Biennale (1999) and participated in documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel (2017). She is working on a book of her Haystacks series, edited by Monika Szewczyk and with assistance from an award granted by the Graham Foundation, Chicago.

Shuttle

A shuttle service is available from train station Ghent-Sint-Pieters (leaving at 18:30 sharp, upon registration) to Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens and back.