Kosovar artist Petrit Halilaj works with documents, memories, and stories from former Yugoslavia. In 2013, the artist represented Kosovo's first national pavilion at the Venice Biennale.
Read MorePetrit Halilaj was born in 1986 in Kostërrc, Kosovo, but left the country during the Yugoslav Wars (1991–2001) when he was 13.
Halilaj moved to a refugee camp in Albania, where Italian psychologists gave him and other children markers to draw as a means to process the trauma of war. After his family settled in Milan, the artist studied at Brera Academy of Fine Arts and moved to Berlin in 2008.
Merging rustic materials and a futuristic imagination, Peter Halilaj's drawings, videos, and installations contend with memories of war and displacement with flair.
Personal biography is a central source for Halilaj, whose memories of Kosovo have translated into curious installations treating national and individual identity with motifs such as hens, bird nests, lost relics, and the family home that was destroyed in the war.
At the 2010 Berlin Biennale, his installation The places I'm looking for, my dear, are utopian places, they are boring and I don't know how to make them real (2010) presented a skeleton scaffolding of the house ahead of its reconstruction in Kostërrc.
At Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen in 2012, oversized reconstructions of jewellery the artist's mother buried during the war were covered with pigment and debris from ruins of the former house. In Who does the earth (2012), the artist appears on screen as an adult, chasing butterflies on the hill where the building stood, now overtaken by nature.
In Halilaj's work, science-fiction and imagination introduce colour and possibility to otherwise difficult experiences. They recall the importance of collective recollection while urging the audience to consider the work beyond the context of the artist's personal history.
Estrangement and intrigue characterise installations such as 26 Objekte n' Kumpir (2009), a futuristic vitrine holding replicas of objects handmade by Halilaj's paternal grandfather, covered in branches and planted in soil like an alien vessel.
They are Lucky to be Bourgeois Hens II (2009), a life-size chicken coop shaped after a space rocket and housing living hens, materialised the need to look beyond the circumstances that nurture individual histories, freeing the birds with a vessel that enables flight.
Very volcanic over this green feather, Halilaj's 2021 exhibition at Tate St Ives, presented an immersive environment of enlarged nature and war images, which transformed 38 drawings he made as a child into bright, suspended foliage.
Petrit Halilaj is the recipient of the 2017 Mario Merz Prize. That same year, he was awarded a special jury mention at the 57th Venice Biennale.
In 2024, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York commissioned the artist to create a sculptural installation for their roof garden.
Petrit Halilaj's work has been shown widely.
Select solo exhibitions include: kamel mennour, Paris (2022); Tate St Ives, Cornwall (2021); Palacio de Cristal, Madrid (2020); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2018); New Museum, New York (2017); Hangar Bicocca, Milan (2015); WIELS Contemporary Art Center, Brussels; and the 54th Venice Biennial (both 2013).
Selected group exhibitions include Manifesta 14, Pristina (2022); Queens Museum, New York (2020); OCAT Institute, Beijing and the 15th Lyon Biennale, France (both 2019); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2018); Foundation Merz, Turin, and Hamburger Kunsthalle, Germany (both 2017); and National Gallery of Kosovo, Prishtina (2012).
The artist works between Berlin Pristina, Kosovo, and Bozzolo, Italy.
Petrit Halilaj is represented by kurimanzutto, Mexico City/New York; kamel mennour, Paris; and ChertLüdde, Berlin.
The artist's Instagram can be found here.
Elaine YJ Zheng | Ocula | 2023
