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Between Mercury and Mars, Home

Solo exhibition of artworks by Besnik Grainca

Tulla – Culture Center | 06–27 February 2026

The exhibition brings together drawings and paintings to reveal a

layered and ongoing artistic practice by Besnik Grainca. Known

primarily as an architect, he here presents his first solo exhibition of

artworks. The works on view trace a personal yet open-ended field of

inquiry, where thinking, drawing, and imagining operate as parallel

forms of exploration.

From the beginning, Between Mercury and Mars, Home was

imagined as a spatial experience, a condition shaped by

movement, hesitation, and return. Rather than encountering the

works all at once, the visitor is invited to enter a situation where

meaning unfolds gradually, through proximity, distance, and

repetition.

The title refers to two states that coexist throughout the exhibition.

Mercury represents speed, immediacy, and the restless movement

of thought. This condition appears most clearly in the drawings,

which form a central, vertical archive within the space.

Accumulating through variations and repeated gestures, the

drawings resist finality. They remain active, provisional, and in motion,

closer to thinking than to illustration.

Mars represents projection, distance, and the pull toward elsewhere.

This condition is carried by the paintings, not only by their placement

1as pauses within the space, but also by what they depict.

Departures, trajectories, launches, and lines drawn across the sky

hold the desire to go further, to test distance, and to imagine

another horizon, even when the body remains grounded.

The exhibition does not choose between these two states. Instead, it

exists in the tension between them. Visitors are invited to move

physically through the space, to circle the archive, to approach and

step back, and to encounter works from different angles. This

movement mirrors the way the artist’s thinking unfolds, not directly,

but through return and accumulation.

Home, in this context, appears as an idea rather than a place. It is

something built between leaving and returning, between what we

search for and what we choose to carry. Present both as a threshold

and as an image, home functions as a quiet orientation point, a

condition that allows movement without being lost.

Rather than offering conclusions, Between Mercury and Mars, Home

creates a space for attention. It invites slowing down, repetition, and

staying with what is still forming. The exhibition allows visitors to

experience the works as part of a continuous process that remains

open, unfinished, and alive.

Besnik Grainca is an architect based in Tirana. Alongside his

architectural practice, he has developed a long-term body of

drawings and paintings that explore movement, structure, repetition,

and imagination. Between Mercury and Mars, Home marks his first

solo exhibition of artworks