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Kairo Urovi

@kairo.kay

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Where We Meet explores how spaces of making can function as sites of learning and connection. Developed by artists Eva Jonas and Kairo Urovi with Queer Grounds, a group of young people from Brighton and Eastbourne, the upcoming installation at Jubilee Library is a response to their creative workshop environment and its material practices.

Working across staged and improvised image-making, the exhibition explores queer community organising and DIY building culture. Photographs trace moments of engagement with tools, timber, workshop structures, and one another – gathered in part of within a workshop that took place with the queer-led carpentry organisation In Our Hands, based in West Sussex.

The art works will sit within a wooden structure devised by the artists and created by In Our Hands and the community team in which the structure has served as a training opportunity for women and gender-diverse people to develop their building skills. After the exhibition the structure will be returned to In Our Hands who will develop it in conversation with a local community group for donation.

Eva Jonas and Kairo Urovi are both visual artists and educators who facilitated Queer Grounds from September 2025 - July 2026. Since then they have gone on to develop workshop methodologies that explore performance-based strategies through collaborative photographic actions drawing from queer movements.

Queer Grounds is a free programme of LGBTQ+ friendly creative workshops for young people aged 16 – 25 led by photographers Eva Jonas and Kairo Urovi delivered by Photoworks in partnership with the Devonshire Collective and Phoenix Art Space.

Queer Grounds is:
@iris.flynt
@bear_clip
@cunexttuesday.collective
@artbyleyla._
@jagoimaging
@nualaephotography
@rey.illustrates_
@zlmnt

Where We Meet will be exhibited at Jubilee Library as part of Photoworks Festival. by @kairo.kay

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4 days ago

With great pleasure, we introduce our current resident at Iatrus Residency Program – Kairo Urovi @kairo.kay

Part of our Balkan Echo residency program, Kairo joins a growing network of artists whose voices, experiences, and practices continue to expand the conversation across the region. The echo is becoming bigger and bigger, carrying stories that move across borders, generations, and places.

Kairo Urovi (b. 2000) is a visual artist living and working between Essex (UK) and Shkodër (Albania). Drawing on personal archives and the experience of growing up between Italy, the UK, and Albania, his work explores the afterlives of migration, displacement, and belonging. Moving between documentary observation and constructed image-making, he treats photography less as a record than as a space where memory and fiction converge, reimagining inherited narratives and questioning fixed notions of identity.

His work has been exhibited internationally, including at Paris Photo, PH Museum Days Festival, and Bazament Art Space.

The project Echo from the Balkans is part of IATRUS residency programme and realised with the financial support of Национален фонд Култура National Culture Fund @nationalculturefund , Bulgaria under the Creation 2025 programme. taken in Iatrus Residency Program by @kairo.kay

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2 months ago

Shkodran Boy (2023)

I’m taking over @thephotographersgallery this weekend and sharing some new, unreleased work from my ongoing project ‘Stray Dog’.

11 years after my last visit and 3 years after a gender transition I travelled back to Shkoder (Albania). This body of work explores the intersections of my being seen as queer and defining a new language for trans-masculinity in Albania. There are frictions between wanting to be seen and hiding, between empty spaces and the ones I inhabit. by @kairo.kay

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2 years ago

the sound of grief

shkoder, 2023 by @kairo.kay

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3 years ago

Pegasus (2023)

"Searching for a vocabulary of queerness in Albanian culture and history is like putting your hand in front of your face in a dark room — sometimes, if you stare hard enough, you can just about make out the outline."

To have my work seen by the wider public is already a strange, vulnerable feeling. But to have a fellow Albanian look at and write about it fills my heart with joy even more.
My friend jonamadani wrote about 'Light Are the Wounds Heave Is the Wind' for @kosovo2point0. Thank you Jona for putting in words what I couldn't articulate and thank you @kosovo2point0 for the feature.

You can find the article in the link in bio.

❤️ taken in Shkodër, Albania by @kairo.kay

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3 years ago

From Somewhere I Am Still Arriving / Endem Rrugës për diku

Showing at @bazamentartspace until 30th May by @kairo.kay

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a year ago

Echoing @anthony_anaxagorou’s words: ‘feels crass and frankly absurd to be posting about anything other than the only thing we should all be talking about right now, but my head is in a bad place as I'm sure everyone’s is so I had to do that thing that therapists talk about, you know, the glimmer of hope, the focusing on a snippet of achievement to remind yourself there is still a world out there that isn't full of carnage and murder.’

From tomorrow 8th November until Sunday 12th I will be at @parisphotofair as one of the finalists for the Carte Blanche Student Award, showcasing my project ‘Light Are the Wounds Heavy Is the Wind’.
My journey back to Albania was one filled with fear, misplaced longing and a desire to carve out a space for myself there as a queer and trans person. As a kid from Shkoder, living in-between cultures and languages, showing this work around Europe is surreal. If you wanna hear more about it come say hi. 🤍

See u there ! by @kairo.kay

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3 years ago

Vajze Shkodrane
41 minutes video installation, 2025
from “Somewhere I Am Still Arriving”
@bazamentartspace by @kairo.kay

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a year ago

Superman (2024)

From ‘Stray Dog’, my WIP book dummy currently showing at @phmuseumdays 🤍 taken in Shkodër, Albania by @kairo.kay

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2 years ago

from my debut solo show early this year
‘Somewhere I Am Still Arriving’ / ‘Endem rrugës për diku’ | 24.04-30.05.2025
presented by @bazamentartspace

'Somewhere I Am Still Arriving by Kairo Urovi is a new body of work created specifically for Bazament. The exhibition centers on a house, a body in motion, and the memories that intertwine the two. The house — on Rruga Ludovik Saraçi in Shkodra — is a place both real and remembered, intimate and fragmented.

Through performance, photography and the stories of his grandmothers Urovi constructs a personal landscape where movement becomes memory and memory becomes material. In a play between presence and absence, visitors are invited into a space charged with the poetics of migration and home — a place one continuously returns to, yet never fully arrives at.'

install photos by Giulia Dajci

endless thanks to the team @amantiapeza @rrezjadiellit @hina_shkembi @joanameraja @frankalzhj @ermirketa you the best
🌟🌟 by @kairo.kay

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a year ago

‘do step in each other’s toes’ opens tomorrow, Friday 17th July at Volt Gallery @devonshirecollective. Three pieces will be shown alongside works by Tessa Boffin and new commissions from @makschram and @leahmclaine.

These are final outcomes from facilitating Queer Grounds with @evalouisaj. We used photography as a playful tool, creating 3 different prompts that invited the participants to think of ways to connect, balance & hold themselves within the images.

Thank you @inourhands_org for the beautiful wooden frames. 💚

Queer Grounds is @jagoimaging @amy @nualaephotography @rey.illustrates_ @zlmnt ❤️

@photoworks.lab
@photoworks_uk by @kairo.kay

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3 months ago

Kafe (2023)

And some BTS taken by my grandma 🤍 taken in Shkodër, Albania by @kairo.kay

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3 years ago