Visitors to Art Basel will see a work in the Parcours public art section of Art Basel this year by an unlikely art star: the Prime Minister of Albania, Edi Rama. The politician is showing a bronze sculpture, Untitled (2026), which stands at the end of Clarastrasse overlooking the Rhine.
Last October, Société gallery in Berlin announced it had added Rama to its roster of artists. (He is also represented by Marian Goodman Gallery.) “For Parcours, Rama presents a new, large-scale bronze sculpture created after drawings made at the Kryeministria [Albania‘s seat of government],” says a statement from Société, adding that Rama’s drawings are produced during and between meetings in his role as prime minister.
Edi Rama is serving his fourth term as Albania’s prime minister Photo: Rolf Poss; Imago/Alamy Stock Photo
Rama’s current show at Société’s Berlin space, titled Chrysalizing (until 27 June), includes a series of new bronze sculptures. “Spanning the first floor of the gallery and extending outdoors into the garden, forms on pedestals and low plinths surge, swell, swirl, and multiply,” says a gallery statement. “[The Parcours] work is a version of the bronze currently on view in Société’s garden with a different colour of the patina,” adds a gallery spokesperson.
Rama—who secured an unprecedented fourth term in May 2025 after campaigning to bring Albania into the European Union—is an established artist. Trained at Tirana’s Academy of Fine Arts, he spent several years working in Paris before turning to politics in the late 1990s, becoming prime minister in 2013. Since then, he has continued to make art, exhibiting at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2010 and at the Venice Biennale in 2017.
Rama’s tenure has been mired in controversy, though. Last November Belinda Balluku, Albania’s deputy prime minister and a close associate of Rama’s, was suspended over a corruption scandal. Balluku was dismissed by Rama in late February; she denies any wrongdoing and was also contacted for comment.
• Parcours, various locations, Basel, until 21 June
