Odeta Xheka: An Offering of Truth
Odeta Xheka is a multidisciplinary artist working across painting, collage, digital media, as well as a writer, poet, and curator. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and featured in literary and art magazines. As a woman long expected to be the subject rather than the storyteller, she uses art to assert her voice—an antidote to the silence imposed by a culture that prefers simplicity and categorization. Poetics of the Body explores womanhood as both a conceptual and physical presence—one that bears ancestral trauma and legacy. Here, the female body becomes not only an active canvas but a battleground where empowerment and creativity unfold, inviting emotional truths so profound they leave no space for passive spectatorship.
How did your creative journey begin?
My creative journey began in Berat, Albania, where I was born, and it has been shaped by many places, languages, and identities. I studied art history in Athens, Greece, and later moved to Brooklyn, New York, where I spent sixteen transformative years. During that time, I raised a family while also slowly and quietly building my artistic voice.
Art became my way of processing the emotional complexity of migration, motherhood, and memory. I was drawn to collage, assemblage, and mixed media, methods that reflect the fragmented, layered experience of living between cultures and roles. Over time, my practice grew into a multidisciplinary exploration of identity, resilience, and the poetic beauty found in the overlooked or broken.
Eventually, I relocated to Tampa, Florida, where I founded OXH Gallery, a space born out of my desire to elevate women’s voices in contemporary art. Through my work as an artist, curator, and writer, I aim to create experiences that resonate deeply, provoke thought, and celebrate the fragile yet fierce beauty of existence. It is how I take space, tell stories, and invite others to view art as an act of reclamation.
Your work often emerges from a refusal to be silenced—as a woman, a mother, and an artist. When did you first begin to feel art was your way of claiming narrative power?
I’ve always felt that art, both making it and living with it, is a way of refusing silence. I come from a place and time where speaking too much, especially as a woman, came with consequences. Art became the one place where I could be fully myself without explanation or translation. It allowed me to hold contradiction, emotion, memory, all the things that felt too large or too fragile to say out loud. But it wasn’t until I began actively working across mediums - painting, collage, digital assemblage, and language - that I fully understood not only just how powerful that refusal could be but also that art isn’t just about self-expression. It is about taking back authorship of your own narrative. It’s about making the invisible visible, on your own terms.
So when people ask me when I began to claim narrative power through art, I’d say: I didn’t step into it all at once. It was a quiet accumulation of gestures (cutting, arranging, reworking) that eventually became a language. A language I trusted more than the ones I spoke aloud. And once I found that, I never looked back.
How do you negotiate the vulnerability of personal storytelling with the demand to connect meaningfully with others?
In my work, the tension between intimacy and resonance is a continuous negotiation, often rooted in a very private place: a memory, a loss, a question that won’t let go. But I never make work with the intention of telling my story in a literal way. What I’m after is something more layered - a felt truth that can hold multiple meanings at once.
Vulnerability, for me, is not about oversharing. It’s about presence. It’s about being honest in the process, letting the internal monologue lead, and not smoothing over the rough edges just to make something more palatable. I think people recognize that. So much of what I do whether I’m stitching, collaging, writing, or curating is about inviting others into a moment of reflection. I’m not saying, "This is my story, now listen." I’m saying, "Here’s a fragment of something real. Does it touch something in you?" When you approach the work with sincerity rather than strategy, it creates space for others to bring their own meaning and shared emotional/moral ambiguity into it. And that’s where the connection happens. Vulnerability as an offering of truth. Vulnerability as a bridge. Not a spotlight. Not a performance. Just quiet reflection.
What does a typical day in the studio look like for you, and how has your art practice grown or changed?
There’s no such thing as a typical day in the studio. My practice isn’t linear. It’s more like a constellation of gestures that build over time: collecting fragments, rearranging, writing, looking, walking away, coming back. Some days, it’s very tactile - hours of cutting, gluing, stitching. Other days, it’s all internal. Reading, editing, thinking through a show I’m curating. But it’s all part of the same ecosystem. I used to think I had to compartmentalize (artist here, curator there, writer somewhere else). Now I embrace and rather enjoy how it all overlaps especially when it comes to curating which has undeniably deepened my practice as an artist. While I have always been one of those artists quite aware of context, intention, how a work breathes next to another, etc., curating is teaching me to look very closely not just at what I’m making and why I’m making it, but also how it goes on to live in the world, how it’s received, how it’s held, how it speaks with and through other women’s voices.
My practice has definitely grown more intentional. I’m less afraid of pauses. As my own life has become slower and more layered, so has my work. And honestly, I think that’s where the power is: not in constant production, but in sustained attention.
Ancestral trauma appears as a quiet undercurrent in your statement. How do you carry—or confront—legacy in your work?
Yes, ancestral trauma is very much present in my work though rarely in explicit ways. It shows up in the silences, in the fragmentation, in the way I layer and unlayer materials that have lived other lives. I come from a place where so much history has been erased, rewritten, or buried beneath shame and fear. As a woman, an immigrant, and a mother, I carry that legacy in my body whether I name it or not. But my work doesn’t aim to resolve that inheritance. Instead, it holds space for it—to feel it, to question it, to allow it to exist without forcing a narrative. In that sense, art becomes a form of quiet confrontation. A soft resistance. I often think of it as repairing through arrangement, assembling what has been broken, not to make it whole, but to give it form and voice. Working with other women artists - through OXH Gallery and beyond - has deepened this process of reckoning. That’s the core of OXH: to hold up work that refuses erasure, that insists on complexity, contradiction, and survival. And I don’t do this alone. Erin Titus, whose ability to listen through the lines makes her crucial in shaping how these stories are presented, serves not only as the exhibition designer but also as a great sounding board every time I wax lyrical about curatorial concepts that are layered, intentional, and emotionally resonant. This summer, together with Kaylin Price, she will curate “One In the Hand, Two In the Fold”. By “showcasing the commodification of labor for personal branding and the cyclical relationship this creates between the individual and the marketplace” these younger generation curators join their efforts with OXH in building something more than shows; building a language of care, resistance, and reimagining. In other words, legacy, for me, isn’t about honoring what came before. It’s about questioning what we’ve inherited, choosing what to carry forward, and creating space for something new - an artwork, an art space, an art professional - to emerge on our terms.
How has social media impacted your work?
Social media is a double-edged mirror. On one hand, it’s given me access to artists I would’ve never encountered, to conversations unfolding across borders, to a kind of visibility that was once hard to imagine. Especially as someone working across mediums and identities, that kind of platform has been invaluable. It’s helped me build OXH Gallery into something that lives beyond physical space, connecting women artists who are doing emotionally complex, genre-defying work, often in quiet or overlooked corners of the world.But I’m also aware of how easily social media can speed up into a frenzy and flatten nuance. My work often deals in ambiguity, memory, fragmentation… all things that don’t always translate in a scroll. So I try to approach it as an extension of my practice, not the center of it. A tool, not a compass.
Do you see a difference in how audiences respond to your digital work versus your physical pieces? Does that change how you approach each medium?
Yes, there’s a difference. Digital work is encountered quickly so I think about intimacy and immediacy: how to make someone pause, feel, despite the speed. Physical pieces invite something else entirely. They carry weight, texture, presence. People linger with them. They stop to breathe and feel in front of them.
That changes how I approach each medium. With digital, I focus on layering and closeness. With physical work, it’s about residue, that intractable thing that lingers after the viewer walks away. Neither is more important, but each demands a different kind of attention. The tension between the two pushes me to stay flexible, to keep asking: What does this work need in order to be seen fully? And more importantly: What does the audience need in order to feel it?