Kledia Spiro

Kledia Spiro creates videos, performances, installations, and paintings. She was born in Albania and was part of an Olympic weightlifting team. She uses strength and weightlifting as a symbol of survival, empowerment, and celebration. Weightlifting becomes a vehicle for discussing women’s roles in society, immigration, and times of war. Spiro has performed in New York at the Queens Museum, Songs for Presidents Gallery, Grace Exhibition Space, Rosekill, Panoply Performance Lab, Java Studios, Le Petit Versailles, and in Boston at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Mobius, Piano Craft Gallery, Bathaus, Distler Performance Hall, and the New England Conservatory. Her work has been featured internationally, most notably at Stratosphere, NFT Art Week Beijing, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Queens Museum, New York, SAIC Sullivan Galleries, Chicago, Museum of Art, University of New Hampshire, Satellite Art Show, Miami Art Week, and the ProArts Gallery in Oakland, California.

Spiro explores the connection between strength, weightlifting, and daily life as a new celebratory ritual for understanding the relationship between the artist and the audience, as well as the present and the past. By experimenting with indeterminate methods, Spiro wants the viewer to access the otherwise inaccessible spaces. Her works are based on Freudian and Piagetian behavioral concepts: visions that reflect psycho-analysis, behavioral psychology, and a sensation of indisputability, combined with details of odd, eccentric, absurd, totemic, and humoristic elements. By questioning where one is and the concept of movement, she investigates the manipulation of lifting objects overhead and its effects.

Spiro received her MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University. She also received the Museum Studies Certificate from Tufts University in 2015. She has a BA from the College of the Holy Cross in Studio Art and Psychology with an Asian Studies Concentration. In 2018, she was the Keynote Speaker at the Centennial New England Museum Association Conference. In 2017, she was selected as a TEDx speaker and performer for “The Pursuit of Creativity.” In 2016, she was the video director that received the Massachusetts Cultural Council Award for the Mayors Art Challenge. In 2015, she was awarded the Graduate Student Travel Grant by Tufts University and was also selected as one of five artists for the New England Media Symposium on the panel “Gender, Technology and Media: Hypothetical Schematics” at Emerson College. In 2014, she was appointed as the MFA Graduate representative for Exhibitions at the SMFA. Spiro was a visiting artist and guest lecturer at the College of the Holy Cross in 2014.