Petrit Halilaj Sculpts Desktop Doodles on Met Rooftop

The museum's latest Roof Garden Commission foregrounds our collective mark-making, imagination, and play.

Kosovar artist Petrit Halilaj's expansive new sculptural installation, Abetare (2024), feels like a natural extension of the winding wisteria branches on the Metropolitan Museum of Art's rooftop.

Upon closer examination, the gestural strokes of the sculptures are crafted not from wood but darkened steel and bronze, skilfully bent and welded into an array of eclectic shapes.

Between the three largest sculptures—a flower, a house, and a spider—are stars and clouds, ghosts and birds, stick figures, hearts, and more.

'I deliberately avoided creating a monumental centrepiece for viewers to focus on,' Halilaj said.

Instead, he presents the sculptures as entangled elements, multilayered and spread across the roof, peaking and prodding from unexpected places. It's messy. It's playful. It's mischievous.

Crafted from doodles, drawings, and scribbles discovered on school desks throughout the Balkan region, the sculptures form the latest and most ambitious edition of Abetare, a work Hailaj first showed in 2015 based on sketches found at his elementary school in Runik, Kosovo.

This iteration stems from extensive research comprising approximately 3,000 images of doodles found on desks in rural schools across Albania, Montenegro, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, and Serbia.

Halilaj's broader exploration was driven by the desire to construct his own intimate map of a region that endured a decade of brutal ethnic conflict between 1991 and 2001. At a very young age, Halilaj was himself ousted from his village in northern Kosovo on ethnic grounds, finding refuge at a camp in neighbouring Albania.

The installation refers to political ideologies, culturally-specific heroes, and more universal symbols. This is most evident on a grey wall in one corner where Halilaj has hidden: a tiny metallic depiction of a hammer, sickle and star; the compass symbol of NATO's logo; 'Toshe', a reference to Macedonian singer Toše Proeski, who was lovingly dubbed the 'Elvis Presley of the Balkans'; and, in larger script, the surname of football star Lionel Messi.

The arrangement of sketches in Halilaj's installation defies chronology. While historical cues, like the mention of a popular athlete or celebrity, allow us to place some doodles within a specific region or timeframe, others, like sketches of a flower or a tree, are timeless, transcending borders and political regimes.

Through this multilayered tableau, the artist emphasises the importance of collective mark-making, play, and imagination.

'I believe that things are interconnected in space and time,' said the artist, 'even when they seem fragmented at first sight.'

So what does he hope people take away from this staging?

'A chance to complete the fragmented realities that I myself am trying to complete—even though they remain fundamentally impossible to grasp in their full complexity.'

The network of associations in Halilaj's installation leads us not only to children in the Balkan region but also—completing realities as best we can—to those, around the world, whose childhoods are banal, hopeful, and sometimes interrupted by unimaginable violence. —[O]