PETRIT HALILAJ

Portfolio

ChertLüdde

Born in Kostërrc (Skenderaj-Kosovo), 1986. Lives and works in Berlin.

Residencies:

2018Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (SARF), Washington D.C.

2016MAK-Schindler Scholarship Program at the Mackey Apartments, Los Angeles.

2014Villa Romana, Florence.

2013Fürstenberg Zeitgenössisch, Donaueschingen.

Grants – Prizes:

2017Mario Merz Prize

2010Blau Orange 2010 – shortlist Simon Denny, Petrit Halilaj, Klara Liden, Nora Schultz.

Solo Exhibitions:

2018SHKREPËTIMA, Fondazione Merz, Turin (upcoming)Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (upcoming)ChertLüdde, Berlin (upcoming)Paul Klee Zentrum, Bern

2017RU, Curated by Helga Christoffersen, New Museum, New York

2015Space Shuttle in the Garden, Hangar Bicocca, curated by Roberta Tenconi, MilanABETARE, curated by Moritz Wesseler and Carla Donauer, Kölnischer Kunstverein, CologneShe fully turning around became terrestrial, curated by Rein Wolfs, at Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn

2014Yes but the sea is attached to the earth and it never floats around in space. The stars would turn off and what about my planet?, Kamel Mennour, Parisof course blue affects my way of shitting, Chert, BerlinDarling squeeze the button and remove my memory, Galeria e Arteve e Kosovës, PrishtinaI’m hungry to keep you close. I want to find the words to resist but in the end there is a locked sphere. The funny thing is that you’re not here, nothing is, Kunshalle Lissabon, Lisbon

2013July 14th?, Foundation d’Enterprise Galeries Lafayette, ParisI’m hungry to keep you close. I want to find the words to resist but in the end there is a locked sphere. The funny thing is that you’re not here, nothing is, Kosovo Pavillion, Venice Biennale, curated by Kathrin Rhomberg, commissioned by Erzen Shkololli, Arsenale, VenicePoisoned by men in need of some love, curated by Elena Filipovic, WIELS Contemporary Art Center, BrusselsPetrit Halilaj, Tongewölbe T25, Ingolstadt

2012Who does the earth belong to while painting the wind?!, curated by Giovanni Carmine, Kunsthalle Sankt Gallen, St. Gallen

2011Petrit Halilaj, curated by Veit Loers, Kunstraum Innsbruck, InnsbruckKostërrc (CH), Statements, Art Basel , with Chert, Berlin

2009Back to the Future, curated by Albert Heta, Stacion, Center for Contemporary Art Prishtina, Kosovo.Petrit Halilaj, solo exhibition, Chert, Berlin.

1996Shote Galica, Scuola Elementare, curated by Behlul Spahiu, Runik-Kosovo

Selected Group Exhibitions:

2018New Materialism, Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm (upcoming)CHILDHOOD. Another Banana Day for the Perfect Fish, Palais de Tokyo, ParisTHAT’S IT!, MAMbo - Sala delle Ciminiere, BolognaWhen Animal Talked to Human, Traversia Cuarto, MadridFriend of a Friend, ChertLüdde hosted by Foksal Gallery Foundation, WarsawUna vida doméstica – A Domestic Life, Curated by José Esparza Chong Cuy, Curated Sector at Salón Acme, Mexico City

2017Mit den Händen zu greifen und doch nicht zu fassen, Kunsthalle MainzArt and Alphabet, Curated by Brigitte Kölle, Hamburger Kunsthalle, HamburgFriends of Birds, Curated by Jeanne Barral, DOC!, ParisViva Arte Viva, 57th Venice Biennale, curated by Christine Macel, Arsenale, VeniceAn ear, severed, listens, ChertLüdde, BerlinMario Merz Prize, Fondazione Merz, TurinFriends of Birds, Curated by Jeanne Barral, DOC!, ParisExhibition Fellows – Final Projects: Group XLII, MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles

2016Animality, Marian Goodman Gallery, Curated by Jens Hoffmann, LondonTo Walk a Line, Akademie der Künste der Welt, Köln for PLURIVESALE VThe Distance of a Day: New in Contemporary Art, curated by Rita Kersting, The Israel Museum, JerusalemTriennale Fellbach, Curated by Susanne Gaensheimer, Co-Curator Anna Goetz, Alte Kelter FellbachPar tibi, Roma, nihil, Curated by Raffaella Frascarelli, Palatin Hill, RomeSUPER SUPERSTUDIO, Co-curated by Andreas Angelidakis, Vittorio Pizzigoni and Valter Scelsi, PAC-Pavilion of Contemporary Art, Milan

2015Alfred Jarry Archipelago: ‘HA ‘HA, curated by Leonardo Bigazzi, Museo Marino Marini, FlorenceAppearance & Essence - Timișoara Art Encounters 1st Edition, curated by Nathalie Hoyos and Rainald Schumacher, Art Encounters Foundation, TimisoaraFlorenz Contemporary, Italian Embassy in Berlin, BerlinThirty one, curated by Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Petrit Halilaj, National Gallery of Kosovo, KosovoWhat’s Love Gotta Do With It, S.A.L.T.S., SwitzerlandTrouble in Paradise, curated by Rein Wolfs, Bundeskunsthalle, Bonnlip of the Tongue, curated by Caroline Bourgeois and Danh Vō, Punta della Dogana, Venice

2014Shit and Die, Palazzo Cavour, curated by Maurizio Cattelan, Myriam Ben and Marta Papini, Turin

Fragile Sense of Hope, Telekom Collection, curated by Nathalie Hoyos and Rainald Schumacher, meCollectors Room, BerlinArtists’ Artists, Marian Goodman Gallery, New YorkFieldworks: Animal Habitats in Contemporary Art, curated by Chris Clarke, Lewis Glucksman Gallery, CorkVilla Romana-Preisträger 2014, Villa Romana, Florence

2013Editionshow, Chert, BerlinZweiter Streich, Fürstenberg Zeitgenössisch, Donaueschingen.SUPER Visions - Zeichnen und Sein, curated by Stefanie Heckmann, Museum Schloss Moyland, Moyland

2012Fuoriclasse – 20 years of Italian Art in the class of Alberto Garutti, curated by Luca Cerizza, Galleria d’Arte Moderna, MilanIt doesn’t always have to be beautiful, unless it’s beautiful, Muslim Mulliqi prize, The Kosovo Art Gallery, PrishtinaNew Public, curated by Rein Wolfs, Museion, BolzanoLost and Found, curated by Isabel Devriendt, Wilfried Huet, Dirk Engelen, Stella Lohaus, ERROR ONE, Antwerp30 Künstler/30 Räume, curated by Kathleen Rahn, Kunstverein Nürnberg, Albrecht Dürer Gesellschaft, Nuremberg

2011Temporaneo, organised by IMF Foundation and Nomas Foundation, Auditorium, Romenobody, not even the rain, has such small hands, curated by Scott C. Weaver, RaebervonStenglin, ZurichErnste Tiere: Petrit Halilaj, Judith Hopf, Bedwyr Williams, curated by Christina Végh Bonner Kunstverein, BonnOstalgia, curated by Massimiliano Gioni, New Museum, New YorkBased in Berlin, curated by Angelique Campens, Fredi Fischli, Magdalena Magiera, Jakob Schillinger, and Scott Cameron Weaver, Atelierhaus Monbijoupark, BerlinStruktur & Organismus, with Max Frey, Tue Greenfort, Petrit Halilaj, Rita Vitorelli, curated by Stefan Tasch, Marillenhof - Destillerie Kausl, AustriaYou don’t love me anymore, curated by Katja Schroeder, Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster

2010Maladresses ou La Figure de l’idiot, curated by Fanny Gonella, The Institute of Social Hypocrisy, ParisDrinnen & Draussen, Chert, Berlin6th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, curated by Kathrin Rhomberg, KW, BerlinPetrit Halilaj, Heike Kabisch, Carla Scott Fullerton, Berlin–Paris Exchange, Galerie Carlos Cardenas, Paris with Chert, Berlin

2009Melancholy of Compassion, curated by Melih Gorgun, Siemens Gallery, IstanbulTime Machine, curated by Vlado Velkov, Kunstverein Arnsberg

2008The Lamb’s Mother in the Creche?, Chert, BerlinArt is my Playground, Tershane, Istanbul

2006Mediterraneo Contemporaneo, curated by Antonio d’Avossa, Castello Aragonese, TarantoCorpo Urbano, De Portesio, curated by di Bruno Muzzolini, Roberta Baldaro, Massimo Rossi, Fondazione Cominelli, BresciaWireless, curated by Alessandro Mancassola and Bruno Muzzolini, UnorossodueMigre, curated by Katia Anguelova and Alessandra Poggianti, Careof, MilanoOpen Air, curated by Marinella Paderni and Isotta Saccani, Orto Botanico, Parma

1999Bambini Di Kukes, organized by Dr. Poli Giacomo, Palazzo Municipale di CremonaKosove 1999, organized by Ymer Metalia, I° Premio Galleria d’Arte, Lezhe–Albania

Selected Public Collections:

Centre Pompidou, Musée National d’Art Moderne, ParisThe Israel Museum, JerusalemFonds de dotation Famille Moulin, Galerie Lafayette, ParisUniversity of Chicago Booth School of Business, ChicagoNomas Foundation, RomeFurstenberg Collection, DonaueschingenEttore Fico Foundation, Turin Sammlung Telekom Deutschland, LohmarLewben Art Foundation, LituaniaBundeskunstsammlung, The Federal Collection of Contemporary Art of the Federal Republic of GermanyKölnischer Kunstverein, CologneColección Jumex, Mexico CityFRAC Champagne-Ardenne / Regional Funds for Contemporary Art.

Bibliography - Selected Articles:

2016“Petrit Halilaj – Space Shuttle in the Garden at HangarBicocca”, Mousse, 2016 “Petrit Halilaj all’Hangar Bicocca”, Juliet Art Magazine, February 2016“Halilaj: Che borghesi queste galline!”, Sole 24 ore, February 2016“Una casa volante per polli astronauti”, Il Giornale dell’Arte, January 2016

2015 “Artist’s Diary: Petrit Halilaj and Alvaro Urbano, ATP DIARY, July 2015 “Alte Meister, Von Neuen Geliebt”, Monopol, pp. 38, issue #06/2015, June 2015“No More Trauma, but a Long Journey for Homeland: On the Art of Kosovan Artist Petrit Halilaj”, by Yunnia Yang, Art Collection+Design, Taiwan, February 2015, pp. 124-129

2014“Best of 2014” selected by Maurizio Cattelan, ARTFORUM, December 2014“Petrit Halilaj”, by Barbara Casavecchia, ArtReview, January, February 2014

2013“Le mejor de 2013 - Petrit Halilaj selected by Danh Vō”, Código Magazine, issue #78, December 2013“Agenda: Petrit Halilaj at WIELS”, by Babara Casavecchia, Mousse, no. 40, November 2013 “Highlights: Petrit Halilaj”, by Elena Filipovic, Kaleidoscope, issue 18, Summer 2013“Kosovo Historienspiel”, by Birgit Sonna, Art Das Kunstmagazin, June 2013“Papier erobert den Raum”, by Susanne Schreiber, Handelsblatt, March 2013“Kosovo: Première Vénitiene”, Beaux Arts Magazine, February 2013

2012Review of the exhibition “Who does the earth belong to while painting the wind?!”, by Marco Tagliafierro, ARTFORUM, November 2012“’Who does the earth belong to while painting the wind?!’ Kunsthalle Sankt Gallen, St. Gallen.,” by Aoife Rosenmeyer, Art Review, n0. 62 / October 2012“Petrit Halilaj’s new project for Kunsthalle St. Gallen”, by Michele Robecchi, Kunstbulletin, 7-8/2012“Future Greats”, by Giovanni Carmine, Art Review, issue 57, March 2012

2011“Die Zeit zurückdrehen”, by Dorothea Nikolussi-Salzer, Der Standard, October 2011“Eine Himmelsscheibe, die die Zeit zurückdreht”, by Ivona Jelcic, Tiroler Tageszeitung, October 2011“Ingeborg Wiensowski, Loch der Erinnerung”, Spiegel Online, July 25, 2011“Ernste Tiere” im Bonner Kunstverein, General Anzeiger Bonn, July 15, 22011“Art Basel”, Quinn Latimer, Art Agenda, June 17, 2011“Petrit Halilaj - Zeitschrift zuschnitt 42” by Stefan Tasch, Obendrauf, June 2011“Petrit Halilaj, by Johan Lundh, Metropolis M, no. 3 June / July 2011

“Petrit Halilaj - Brand New”, by Laura Cherubini, Flash Art International, March-April 2011

2010“Best of 2010”, by Christine Macel, ARTFORUM, December 2010“Where Is Petrit’s Real House?” by Vincenzo Latronico, Domus, no. 939, September 2010“Kunst im 21. Jahrhundert”, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, DU Magazine, June 2010“6 Berlin Biennale, Spezial”, Monopol, June 2010“Here and there” by Barbara Casavecchia, Mousse, n. 23, April 2010

2009“Home away from home”, by Vincenzo Latronico, Domus, November 2009“Communication seems to be lacking us as well”, Gargarin, no. 19, 2009

2008“Ombre, arte, fucili, case e tableaux vivant. Sotto il cielo dell’arte a Torino e Milano. Artissima, le 50 lune di Saturno e le performance di Tino Sehgal”, by Francesca Pasini, Linus, December 2008

2007“Nuovi, Nuovi, Nuovi, dall’archivio Careof & Viafarini”, by Milovan Farronato, Exibart.onpaper, no. 37, February/March 2007

Catalogues - Publications:

2016“Space Shuttle In The Garden, Petrit Halilaj”, exhibition catalogue at HangarBicocca, published by Mousse Publishing, catalogue edited by Roberta Tenconi. ISBN 9788867492411

2015 “Petrit Halilaj” exhibition catalogue at Kölnischer Kunstverein, Bundeskunsthalle, Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Köln. ISBN: 9783863357344.

2014“Shit and Die”, Maurizio Cattelan, Myriam Ben Salah, Marta Papini, Published by Damiani, Bologna, ISBN: 9788862084024“De Generation of Painting”, published by Fondazione 107, Turin, 2014“Il Piedistallo Vuoto/The Empty Pedestal”, Mousse, texts by Boris Buden, Keti Chukhrov, Vit Havránek, Marco Scotini and Joanna Warsza, Milan, ISBN: 9788867490691“of course blue affects my way of shitting”, Chert and Motto books, Berlin, ISBN: 978294052418“Kushtetuta”, edited by Petrit Halilaj, Alvaro Urbano, Issue 2, Self-published

2013“Kosovo Pavilion - Venice Biennale”, Walther König, edited by Kathrin Rhomberg & Erzen Shkololli, Cologne, ISBN-10: 3863355474, ISBN-13: 978-3863355470“Poisoned by men in need of some love”, exhibition catalogue, edited by Elena Filipovic, WIELS and Motto books, ISBN: 978-2-940524-07-5“Kushtetuta”, edited by Petrit Halilaj, Alvaro Urbano, Issue 1, KOSOVO 2.0“SUPER Visions - Zeichen und Sein”, exhibition catalogue, Museum Schloss Moyland, Verlag für Moderne Kunst, ISBN: 3869844191

2012“New Public”, exhibition catalogue at Museion, Walther König, edited by Rein Wolfs, texts by Federico Campagna, Maria Lind, Rein Wolfs, Cologne, ISBN: 9783863352400“30 Künstler 30 Räume”, exhibition catalogue, Verlag für Moderne Kunst, text by Franz Xaver Baier, Dietrich Mahlow, Angelika Nollert, Nürnberg, ISBN: 978-3-86984-320-9

2011

Artist’s book, published by Kunstraum Innsbruck and Chert, Berlin“Struktur & Organismus”, exhibition catalogue, edited by Stefan Tasch, Marillenhof - Destillerie Kausl, Austria“Ostalgia”, exhibition catalogue, published by New Museum, New York

“Based in Berlin”, exhibition catalogue, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne, ISBN: 9783863350451“Kostërrc (CH)”, brochure, Chert and Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn“My work and me”, edited by Susanne Pfeffer, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne, ISBN: 9783865609052

2010“Blau Orange 2010 – shortlist Simon Denny, Petrit Halilaj, Klara Liden, Nora Schultz”, published by BVR - National Association of German Cooperative Banks“Drinnen & Draussen”, exhibition catalogue, Chert and Motto books, Berlin“What is waiting out there”, Berlin Biennale 2010, curated by Kathrin Rhomberg, DuMont Buchverlag, Cologne“Liste”, fair catalogue, Basel

SHKREPËTIMACurated by Leonardo BigazziPerformance FestivalRunik, Kosovo7 July 2018

SHKREPËTIMA is a performance created and directed by Petrit Halilaj and involving over 30 actors and musicians. The event, which took place in front of the ruins of the House of Culture in Runik (Skenderaj), represents Halilaj’s first major intervention in a public space. The stage was animated by moving sculptures, sounds, lights and an exceptional scenography created by Halilaj from the ruins of the building and inspired by the collective memory of Runik citizens. SHKREPËTIMA brings back fragments from some of the most prominent Albanian plays that were performed in the theater of this building in the 80s.

top: Former House of Culture in Runik (before the intervention, February 2018)

bottom: Former House of Culture in Runik (after the intervention, July 2018)

Shkrepëtima, 2018

Shkrepëtima, 2018

Shkrepëtima, 2018

Shkrepëtima, 2018

Shkrepëtima, 2018

Shkrepëtima, 2018Paul Klee Zentrum, Bern20 July – 19 August 2018

Petrit Halilaj’s exhibition at the Zentrum Paul Klee forms part of a series of projects in New York, Runik (Kosovo), Bern and Turin in which the artist explores the history, identity and environment of his hometown in Kosovo. Halilaj is the laureate of the Mario Merz Prize 2018.

The exhibition revolves around the Kosovar village of Runik, where Halilaj grew up before fleeing with his parents to Albania in the wake of the Kosovo War. Halilaj explores the fact that the village of Runik, rebuilt after the war, is situated on top of one of the largest Neolithic settlements in Southeast Europe. Today, villagers still find Neolithic artefacts in the area, including pottery, ceremonial objects or figurines.

The artist’s current work is driven by the question of what cultural and social role these historical artefacts play in the community of Runik today, or what role they could potentially play in the future. In the absence of formal cultural infrastructure, knowledge about the distant past remains scarce. Instead, the historical artefacts from the past stimulate the popular imagination, and speculation about their origin is rife. By means of telling the curious history of these objects, Halilaj’s video installation The city roofs were so near that even a sleepwalking cat could pass over Runik without ever touching the ground (2017) offers a portrait of contemporary Runik, and, by extension, of Kosovo as a young nation yet uncertain about its history and identity.

In parallel to the exhibition, Halilaj is staging a major cultural event in the former (currently abandoned) cultural centre of Runik. Halilaj has invited numerous locals from the village to participate in this performative and participatory event that he has conceived as a spark (Shkrepëtima in Albanian) that he hopes will initiate the cultural and social development of the community. As part of the exhibition at the Zentrum Paul Klee, Halilaj will present drawings, conceptual studies and sculptures that he has produced in the context of the preparations for this event. Here, the objects from the Neolithic past are poetically activated and transformed into migrating birds and other species that travel, trespass borders, explore new habitats, and settle temporarily in different places – be that in Runik, New York, Bern or Turin.

As part of the exhibition opening, the artist and curator Leonardo Bigazzi will give a presentation on their research and activities in Runik.

The city roofs were so near that even a sleep-walking cat could pass over Runik without ever touching the ground, 2017HD-video, 26’ 55’’Wood, earth, glue, brass, resin, earthDimensions variable

right:Shkrepëtima, 2018Ink drawing on archival document of the Koperativa of Runik, Courtesy the Artist, ChertLüdde, Berlin, kamel mennour, Paris/London and Fondazione Merz, Turin

left:Installation view

both pages:Shkrepëtima, 2018Ink drawing on archival document of the Koperativa of Runik, Courtesy the Artist, ChertLüdde, Berlin, kamel mennour, Paris/London and Fondazione Merz, Turin

PETRIT HALILAJ: RUNew Museum, New Yorkcurated by Helga Christoffersen09/27/17-01/07/18

Petrit Halilaj (b. 1986, Kostërrc, Skenderaj-Kosovo) often uses his own biography as a point of departure, adopting exhibition processes to alter the course of private and collective histories. Encompassing sculpture, drawing, text, and video, many of Halilaj’s works incorporate materials from his native Kosovo and manifest as ambitious spatial installations through which the artist translates personal relationships into sculptural forms.

For his New Museum exhibition, Halilaj presents a major new project that begins in Runik, the city in Kosovo in which he grew up and the site of one of the earliest Neolithic settlements in the region, where some of Kosovo’s most important artifacts have been found. Archaeological digs in 1968 and 1983 uncovered part of the country’s most significant material history from the period, including the musical instrument known as the Runik Ocarina. Now spread across two countries and several institutions as the result of the Kosovo War in the 1990s, the most valuable of these objects currently reside in storage at the Natural History Museum in Belgrade, with the less significant finds still kept at the Kosovo Museum in Pristina. Out of public reach and inaccessible to the people of Runik, these objects hold great symbolic value for a nation missing parts of its shared frame of reference, but also point to the condition of contradictory claims from two countries that share material heritage.

In “Petrit Halilaj: RU,” Halilaj presents a new video work, several large fabric sculptures, and an extensive environment that draws on his research into the flight patterns and habitats of migratory birds. Piecing together multiple institutional and archeological records coming from sources across borders, Halilaj makes the full extent of the findings in Runik available to the public for the first time. Recreating a total of 505 found and recorded objects and fragments as birds who have temporarily taken residence in an imagined landscape, Halilaj envisions these artifacts on temporary stopover, momentarily reunited as beings who live and thrive through movement, rather than belonging to any one site or context. Halilaj rebuts the idea that this collection should define only one nation, and also questions its scope through recollections of its Neolithic civilization by friends and neighbors in Runik. Such narratives are told through objects discovered on their land—horns, heads, torsos—which residents imbue with mystic significance and make the subject of alternative stories of origin. While these stories’ material proof has been displaced or lost, and to this day is still mistrusted to institutions officially charged with caring for them, they exist through description by and in the memory of individuals. This leads Halilaj from the real into the imagined, and he merges the factual with myths that in turn give shape to large sculptural forms that visitors can recline on. With “RU,” Halilaj presents history through personal and collective narratives, defined through movement and temporary residence—ultimately proposing how objects could serve a very different purpose in the context of museums, and as part of histories still being written.

All images: “Petrit Halilaj: RU,” installation views at New Museum, New York. Photos: Dario Lasagni.

How can fiction and imagination participate in a social debate, in politically committed art? How can one share one’s innermost feelings in a context that hinders individual expression?, asks Petrit Halilaj. He was only twelve when his family fled the Kosovo war to seek refuge in a camp in Albania. After studying at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan, he worked in Prishtina, Bozzolo and Berlin. His monumental and profoundly autobiographical installations tell of exile, war, abandoned territory, without ever giving way to drama or pathos.

For the Venice 57th International Art Exhibition, Petrit Halilaj and his mother have made some monumental performative sculptures of moths using traditional Kosovar fabrics. The use of costume and performative sculptures in his practice testifies the poetry and the humor that characterize his work and also his interest in ethnic materials, which itself raises questions about Heimat and identity.Moths have occupied a central place in Halilaj’s imagination since childhood, when he used to chase them around the light bulbs hanging in the family home in Kostërrc. They also refer to the beginning of his artistic career when, invited to a first monographic exhibition at Stacion – Center for Contemporary Art Prishtina in 2009, he discovered the Lepidoptera collection from the former Museum of Natural History in a forgotten reserve. This discovery led him to a series of works entitled Cleopatra, with swirling light bulbs imitating the movement of the insects in the dark. In 2016, with his mother he produced a first moth costume which he donned for a performance during which he walked around a lamp and hid in the corners of the room while a voice-over read a scientific text and poems about moths.

Like in fairy tales, the bestiary that fills Halilaj’s work becomes a personification of human nature. And animals are indeed omnipresent in his work. Through disguise as a delicate moth and by the symbolism of metamorphosis associated with this insect, Petrit Halilaj implements a catharsis of his emotions, his feelings of love. The vulnerability of the moths concealed in the Arsenale is an allusion to his own identity, to the discovery of his sexuality and to the view taken of this by society and by his family.

Petrit Halilaj spends most of his time in his studio. His creativity finds its source in his inner world and in the memories of his childhood, peopled with animals. The irreverence of a cat, the bravery of a family dog or the freedom of the canaries flying in his studio are attitudes with which the artist identifies. Anecdote and personal history are intertwined with collective history: invited to the Berlin Biennale in 2010, he rebuilt the structure of his family home inhabited by chickens (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). Two years later, he made the enlargements of jewellery buried by his mother in their garden as they went into exile (It is the first time dear that you have a human shape, 2012). Do you realise there is a rainbow even if it’s night!?, 2017, also bears witness to this same aspiration for remembering.

The making of the costumes becomes a pretext for an intimate conversation with his mother and a return to the innocence of childhood, to a world that is both personal and utopian. For Halilaj, this process reveals a nostalgia, a desire to slow down a modern world undergoing constant progress and leaving no room for dreams and intimacy, and stresses the artist’s desire to return to the authenticity of a more intense relationship with the world and others.

M. S.(From the catalog of the 57th Venice Biennale).

Do you realise there is a rainbow even if it’s night!?, 2017Installation view 57th Venice Biennale

Courtesy of the artist, ChertLüdde, Berlin and kamel mennour, Paris/London

Do you realise there is a rainbow even if it’s night!? (light green), 2017Dyshek Carpet from Kosovo, Flokati, Polyester, Chenille Wire, Stainless Steel, Brass.body and wings: 229 x 117 x 32 cm lenght including satin: 485 cm

Do you realise there is a rainbow even if it’s night!? (grey and warm yellow), 2017Grey: Qilim Carpet from Kosovo, Flokati, Polyester, Stainless Steel, Brass.Warm yellow: Qilim Carpet from Kosovo, Flokati, Polyester, Chenille Wire, Stainless Steel, Brass.Three light bulbs.Grey: body and wings: 254 x 128 x 33 cmGrey: lenght including tail: 238 cmWarm yellow: body and wings: 268 x 85 x 26 cmWarm yellow: lenght including tail: 385 cm

Do you realise there is a rainbow even if it’s night!? (dark pink), 2017Dyshek Carpet from Kosovo, Flokati, Polyester, Chenille Wire, Stainless Steel, BrassBody and wings: 218 x 112 x 22 cmLenght including tail: 460 cm

Do you realise there is a rainbow even if it’s night!? (light yellow and warm violet), 2017Light yellow: Qilim carpet from Kosovo, Flokati, Polyester,

Chenille Wire, Stainless Steel, BrassWarm violet: Jan carpet from Kosovo, Flokati, Polyester,

Carpet wool, Stainless steel, Brass.Two light bulbs.

Light yellow: body and wings: 193 x 139 x 28 cm.Light yellow: lenght including tail: 520 cm.

Warm violet: body and wings: 262 x 125 x 34 cmWarm violet: lenght including tail: 500 cm

Do you realise there is a rainbow even if it’s night!? (light yellow), 2017 Do you realise there is a rainbow even if it’s night!? (warm violet), 2017

Do you realise there is a rainbow even if it’s night!? (gold), 2017Jan Carpet from Kosovo, Flokati, Polyester, Chenille Wire, Stainless Steel, Brassbody and wings: 215 x 155 x 30 cmlenght including tail: 550 cm

Mario Merz Prize. Finalists Exhibitions 2nd Edition (Group Exhibition)curated by Beatrice MerzFondazione Merz, Turin8 March – 21 May 2017

On occasion of the Mario Merz Prize Finalists Exhibition 2017, Petrit Halilaj is displaying a new series of sculptures from his ongoing project “ABETARE”. The works of the series “ABETARE” were presented for the first time on occasion of the artist’s solo exhibition at Kölnischer Kunstverein in April 2015, curated by Moritz Wesseler and Carla Donauer. The steel sculptures of this series are greatly enlarged objects, which have the shape of doodles, drawings and writings made by students on the school desks of the artist’s former primary school in the Kosovar village of Runik, where Halilaj was born. The school was demolished in favor of a new and more modern one in 2010.

The work of Halilaj is mainly determined by the history of his home country Kosovo and his personal biography. In these series of sculptures he recalls the experience of his childhood and youth, through great empathy themes such as home, memory and identity.

Installation view “ABETARE”, Mario Merz Foundation, Turin, 2017Photos: Renato Ghiazza

Abetare (Man), 2017Steel sculpture.Enlarged reproduction of a drawing found on the school tables of the Primary School “Shotë Galica” Runik, Kosovo.

Abetare (Eye in tears), 2017Steel sculpture.Enlarged reproduction of a drawing found on the school tables of the Primary School “Shotë Galica” Runik, Kosovo.

Abetare (Ore te mesimore), 2017Steel sculpture.Enlarged reproduction of a drawing found on the school tables of the Primary School “Shotë Galica” Runik, Kosovo.

Abetare (Mos prek, U Ç) (don’t touch), 2017Steel sculpture.Enlarged reproduction of a drawing found on the school tables of the Primary School “Shotë Galica” Runik, Kosovo.

The series Si Okarina e Runikut is composed of several sculptural objects created from clay and brass, modelled in the form of an ancient wind instrument found in the archaeological zone of Runik, where the artist’s family is originally from.Similar to ocarinas, these instruments hark back to the prehistoric origins of music and relate to the Neolithic period, which we can only assess through objects, with the contemporary era.

Halilaj created these works after studying the technique from Shaqir Hoti, one of the last people to make and play these traditional musical instruments. However, the artist inserted new elements in them: slender brass tubes with the dual function of precariously-seeming support for the object, and as a mouthpiece that allows the instrument to be used and to generate sound. Simple, light elements are juxtaposed with the rough, material appearance of the ocarinas, thus connecting modernity and antiquity.

Operating and manipulating the functionality of the object, Halilaj turned it from personal to choral, suggesting the participation of several people.

Si Okarina e Runikut acknowledges one of the themes central in Petrit Halilaj’s artistic practice – the intent to establish communication channels between individuals and to create moments of sharing through objects.

Si Okarina e Runikut, 2016Brass, ocarina in clay, stone205 x 30 x 50 cm

Si Okarina e Runikut, 2016Brass, ocarina in clay6 x 9 x 10 cm

‘Space Shuttle in the Garden’, Curated by Roberta Tenconi, Hangar Bicocca, Milano

“Space Shuttle in the Garden” brings together and connects, for the first time, a selection of works by Petrit Halilaj (1986, Kosovo) from recent years as well as new ones conceived specifically for the occasion. Setting out from the life and history of the artist and from the changes that have occurred in his native country, the exhibition explores universal themes such as memory, the search for identity, and the concept of home as both a shared and private space, arriving at reflections on community and on the creation and preservation of a common cultural heritage.

The exhibition is above all a journey into the artist’s universe and mythology. Moving between imagination and reality, Halilaj’s works describe a world which is both familiar and surreal: sculptures, drawings, perfor- mances, videos and installations explore the tides of history and the evolution of the world around us, blen- ding together yesterday and today, the real and utopian, relative and absolute. Each piece, while drawing on events, objects and stories equally from the past and present, looks to the future, always harboring the artist’s hopes and desires, hinting at romantic, humorous and also often peculiar visions and dreams that have yet to come true.

Positioned outside Pirelli HangarBicocca, the work They are Lucky to be Bourgeois Hens II(2009) servesas an antechamber to the show: a wooden rocket ship constructed by the artist’s relatives, neighbours and friends, with its interior painted an elegant Klein blue, is inhabited by chickens, preparing to discover a new still to be invented world.

As an iconic work of the 2010 Berlin Biennial, The places I’m looking for, my dear, are utopian places, they are boring and I don’t know how to make them real (2010-2015), the artist’s reconstructed life-size family house, appears here in a completely new form. A stark, spectral image, the work evokes a sense of loss that neverthe-less shuns all sentimentality and nostalgia. Like a vast family portrait, it describes an idealised place in con-stant transformation. Suspended within the exhibition space, the house now fragmented, reflects the changes its inhabitants have lived through. All the rooms that we consider personal have broken away from the ones with collective, shared functions, to move freely, finding their own place and autonomously inte- racting with the surroundings.

Si Okarina e Runikut (2014) is a series of sculptures inspired by a Neolithic wind instrument found in the village of Runik, Kosovo. The works are vessel flutes that invite visitor participation and while originally conceived to be played individually, the artist reconstructed them to possibly enable collective engagement. Elegantly poised on brass stands or freely strewn on the floor, they decidedly live in the present and in the public moment when the instruments are played. Si Okarina e Runikut thus becomes a metaphor for the entire show: a journey through private, personal experiences that, shared, become a tool for communication, discovering ourselves and questioning the world around us.

Installation views, photos: Agostino Osio

Installation views, photos: Agostino Osio Installation views, photos: Agostino Osio

Untitled (celebration), 2013-2015slide projection(s) (91 slides of pencils drawings)Dimensions variable

They are Lucky to be Bourgeois Hens II, 2009wood, paint, electricity, chickens550 x 150 cm

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 - 2015Wood, iron, various materials8 x 11 x 13 m

It´s the first time dear that you have a human shape,2012 -2015iron structure, house ruinsButterfly: 300 x 600 x 50 cmchain, each element: 0.3 x 0.3 x 40 m

It´s the first time my dear that you have a human shape, 2015Metal sculpture in the shape of a bracelet, house ruins.circa: ø 6.60 m

It is the first time dear that you have a human shape2012Metal and house ruins. Each earring is divided into two parts; the upper part that goes through the ear and the lower part that is a triangle shape.Upper parts: 203.8 x 132.2 cmLower triangles: 245.6 x 149.1 cm

Si Okarina e Runikut, 2014Brass, ocarina in clay, stone (series)

Omar, 2016Hand made astronaut costume, performance

Petrit Halilaj, Alvaro UrbanoWhat comes first, 2015Resin, cement, metal, wood, fabric, and chickens.280 x 220 x 220 cm

Alfred Jarry Archipelago: ‘HA ‘HACurated by Leonardo BigazziMuseo Marino Marini, Florence

The Museo Marino Marini together with the Institut Français Firenze, presents Alfred Jarry Archipelago: ‘ha ‘ha, a programme of performances, installations and screenings curated by Leonardo Bigazzi. The project, which will last four days from the 7th untill the 10th of October, will take place at the Museo Marino Marini, Institut Français Firenze, cinema Spazio Alfieri and other locations. It is part of piano, pre-pared platform for contemporary art, France–Italy 2014-2016, and it is realised within the context of the estate Fiorentina 2015, organised by the commune of Florence.

Performances with dog and canary costumes

ABETAREKoelnischer Kunstverein Opening reception: April 16th, 2015

The base of the artistic work of Halilaj (* 1986) forms the still young life, which is largely determined by the history of his home country Kosovo. In installations, drawings and films he deals with the experiences of his childhood and youth and studied with great empathy themes such as home, memory and identity. It connects to the artist’s work which seem to have sprung from the world of a storyteller, so they appeal to something more universally valid the viewer regardless of its relation to the recent history of South East Europe and affect sustainable.

Halilaj developed for the exhibition at the Kunstverein an extensive group of works relating to the former school in the Kosovar village Runik. The new production includes a film, innumerable sculptures and an installation, which are spread over the entire building of the Cologne Kunstverein, refer to each other and complement each other. The earliest approach to the topic represents the film shown in the cinema, the start-ing material by chance was in 2010 and the school building is one day prior to its demolition. Halilaj docu-mented as young students talk about their memories of the establishment while exploring the site. Passages can first recognize the changes and the coming new school building curiosity and joy. Without the presence of formidable teacher, the behavior of children and adolescents, however, turns into a form of aggressiveness: windows are smashed, pictures torn from the wall or sprayed paint on the walls of the classrooms. It is not unfamiliar with the game forbidden, reflecting the moments of questioning and rebellion.

Very similar aspects of sound in the pavilion, staircase and atrium of the Cologne Kunstverein presented to works that developed Halilaj reference to the former benches and tables his school. So was devoted to the artist doodles, drawings and writings, the students left once on the inventory of the classroom. Halilaj made these settlements greatly enlarged, of thin steel rods gradually transformed in this way which is reflecting in the illicit legacies transgression in something creative. While maintaining the objects defying their sculp-tural form a unique graphic character and unfold in the different areas of the building the effect of filigree drawings in space. The processed motifs, including houses, hearts, birds, flowers, cars, planes, missiles or guns, bear witness to the hopes, aspirations and dreams as well as of the doubts, fears and concerns of former children and adolescents.

How diverse was the ideas of the students of Runik, can be under consideration of the original tables and benches able to track which can be found an overwhelmingly large number of markings and signs. Halilaj has summarized part of the class inventory in the basement of the Cologne Kunstverein to an installation which he accurately placed some of the school desks in rows, while others were piled up to a confusing pile. In ad-dition, the artist a small number of tables and benches has given a special life of its own, which it freed from their existence as mere examples: a school desk seems to be captured by the sculptural lines so to speak, while two other representatives of the inventory in the stairwell of the building into the unattainable grow.

Authority, standards and canons, their acceptance as well as the resistance to it, can be read as overriding themes of the exhibition. While in the film and in the various sculptures the interaction of acceptance and re-jection will be guessed, the installation on the second floor of the Cologne Kunstverein moves its foundations in the foreground. For this work Halilaj has equipped the whole room with a wallpaper that the first primer of the artist, the eponymous publication “ABETARE” shows. Page after page of the book are explorable on the walls and call the familiar process of learning in mind, whereby in addition to the alphabet also the founda-tions of society are taught.

Installation views, photos: Simon Vogel. Steel sculptures. Reproductions of drawings found on the school tables of the Primary School ´Shote Galica´ Runik, Kosovo.

Installation views, photos: Simon Vogel. Steel sculptures. Reproductions of drawings found on the school tables of the Primary School ´Shote Galica´ Runik, Kosovo.

Installation views, photos: Simon Vogel. Steel sculptures. Reproductions of drawings found on the school tables of the Primary School ´Shote Galica´ Runik, Kosovo.

Installation views, photos: Simon Vogel. Steel sculptures. Reproductions of drawings found on the school tables of the Primary School ´Shote Galica´ Runik, Kosovo.

Installation views, photos: Simon Vogel. Steel sculptures. Reproductions of drawings found on the school tables of the Primary School ´Shote Galica´ Runik, Kosovo.

Installation views, photos: Simon Vogel. Steel sculptures. Reproductions of drawings found on the school tables of the Primary School ´Shote Galica´ Runik, Kosovo.

Tables installation, 2015Installation composed of 27 tables from the former Primary School Shote Galica,Runik, Kosovoinstallation: Dimensions variable

Tables installation, 2015Installation composed of 27 tables from the former Primary School Shote Galica,Runik, Kosovoinstallation: Dimensions variable

ABETARE (wallpaper installation), 2015wallpaper, scans of pages from the ABETARE book repeated on gallery wallsDimensions variable

Installation views, photos: Simon Vogel. Steel sculptures. Reproductions of drawings found on the school tables of the Primary School ´Shote Galica´ Runik, Kosovo.

ABETARE2015Digital video21´53”

She, fully turning around, became terrestrialBundeskunsthalle, Bonn

Press release of the Exhibition

Petrit Halilaj (b. 1986) is an artist whose work is concerned with tracing history and biography. The artist quotes images of his personal recollections and draws on them in his work, translating them into the changed reality of the present day and, with it, into a new context and a new ‘guise’ – which often involves consider-able magnification. Halilaj pursues this investigation of the past not just on his own behalf. In many of his installations he reviews and dramatises his own biography, which has been profoundly marked by the Kosovo War (1998– 1999), turning it into a universal example for the quest for identity, for keeping memory alive and for a closer examination of the idea of home – especially in the ever-recurring story of its loss. His installa-tions are carefully conceived, precise narratives that touch the viewer without being nostalgic or mawkishlysentimental.

The artist tends to use simple materials such as earth, straw, wood, concrete, stones or the rubble of his de-stroyed family home. But he also draws on archival material from the defunct Natural History Museum in Pristina, Kosovo (1956– 2001), which he has managed to locate and secure. Partly revised andrecontextualised for the exhibition, it gives expression to the artist’s sustained engagement with memory and history and presents the museum as therepository of the (natural) history of a country, its population and its culture.

Petrit Halilaj has investigated the history of the collection of the Natural History Museum which had to make way for the displays of the Ethnographic Museum of Kosovo. Having tracked down the stuffed animals and other specimens – most of them ruined by years of wilful neglect and damp – in the stores of the Kosovo Museum in Pristina, he has single-mindedly applied himself to the task of ensuring their safety and conserva-tion.

Halilaj’s concerted effort to record and preserve the past for the present deserves great credit, and while the achievement is all his, the Art and Exhibition Hall shares and supports his concern.

She, fully turning around, became terrestrial (stolen canary), 2013. Taxidermy canary from the Museum of Natural History of Kosovo, with brass and paper mask made in col-laboration with Alvaro Urbano.

Installation views, photos: Simon Vogel. Installation views, photos: Simon Vogel.

Poisoned by men in need of some love(Histioteuthis reversa, Octopus vulgaris, Phasianus colchicus, Natrix na-trix linné, two Tintenfish)2013iron, cow excrement, soil, glue, brass300 x 80 x 80 cm

There I wait infinitely for the hurricane to come2013Cabinet from the Museum of Natural History of Kosovo, various rests of taxidermy birds.185 x 120 x 51 cm

Cleopatra201118 insects showcases, (provenience: former Natural History Museum department, Pristhina, Kosovo), light bulb, motor, cable, various materials.each showcase: 12 x 40 x 30 cm

The work For the Birds by Alvaro Urbano and Petrit Halilaj was first conceived during the artist residency program at Villa Romana, Florence in 2013. Stemming from the artists’ personal background of sharing their lives with two canary birds who were able to freely move in their shared living-studio space in Berlin, it morphed into a construction that would en-able these birds to again move freely between the living and studio the artists temporarily inhabited for a few months in Florence. With the help of friends, a large tunnel-like structure was installed on the Villa Romana compounds, which connected one part of the building to another, on the way spanning the large garden.

In 2015, the artists recreated the tunnel for the birds and adapted it to the space of the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn, Germany. Here, the birds were hosted in an aviary on the balcony of the institution’s library, where again they had access to the tunnel spanning across different parts of the building.The work adapts in its form to the space where it is rebuild. The tunnel should provide the birds with a possi-bility to move freely around the architecture that is actually also setting boundaries to it.

Petrit Halilaj, Alvaro UrbanoFor the Birds2015Galvanised chicken wire, two canaries, plants, diverse materials.Dimensions variable

Yes but the sea is attached to the Earth and it never floats around in space. The stars would turn off and what about my planet?Kamel Mennour, Paris

This is not an exhibition. This is a dream. Of the strength of those who make us Visionaries in Arthur Rim-baud’s sense of the word (“The point is to arrive at the unknown by throwing all the senses into disorder”*). Petrit Halilaj, born in Kostërrc, Kosovo in 1986, creates a world both surreal and familiar at the galerie kamel mennour. We enter into this world through astonishment, immediately finding ourselves face to face with a forest of ocarinas perched on legs as though they were trees. Breathe into them and they sing. Ocarinas are wind instruments that have been made in Kosovo since the Neolithic Era. Those composing this forest of ocarinas were modeled and then overmodeled by the artist, who undertook to learn the technique from one of the last ocarina makers in Kosovo, Shaqir Hoti, expressly for this installation. Both the shapes and sounds of these ocarinas lead the visitor toward the extraordinary vision in the gallery’s basement. There, in an intensely pink lake edged by earth, thickets of branches, and stones, stands a horse several meters tall. On its muzzle, the artist has placed a shoka, a long, traditional belt onto which he embroidered the phrase that gives the exhibition its title: “Yes but the sea is attached to the Earth and it never floats around in space. The stars would turn off and what about my planet?” Like all dreams, the installation imagined by Petrit Halilaj presents itself as an enigma. It is a mysterious story whose every element is a world unto itself, and which each viewer is invited to people with his or her own memories, desires, and intimate horizons. Of course, all of the young artist’s works are shaped by History’s intrusions into his childhood, marked by the war in former Yugoslavia and life in an Albanian refugee camp; but for him, the essence of his work is in the establishment of new arrangements, new relationships, and the vital promises they hold. We see evidence of this in the green grass growing on sixty tons of earth from his native land, transported to the contemporary art fair in Basel (“Kostërrc”, 2011), as well as in his cohabitation with flying birds and his companion in the work he created in 2013, on the occasion of Kosovo’s first national pavilion at the Venice Biennial, “I’m hungry to keep you close. I want to find the words to resist but in the end there is a locked sphere. The funny thing is that you’re not here, nothing is”. This motivation is likewise present in “Poisoned by men in need of some love” (2013), which petitioned for the resurrection of the Museum of Natural History in Pristina, whose treasures had been left to mold in basement storage in favor of a folkloric exhibition with ideological ends. For this new work at galerie kamel mennour, Petrit Halilaj calls on the memory of his great-great-grandfather, Baba Gan. While Halilaj never knew Baba Gan, the story of his life is part of the family mythology passed on to the artist by his raconteur grandfather. Baba Gan was a Kosovar intellectual who opened a school and who was assassinated at the beginning of the 20th century. He was regularly called on to calm quarrels and to resolve disputes. While small in stature, he imposed his role as moderator by arriving on a large white horse and wearing a traditional belt that his wife had embroidered with stories that became symbolic statements… That said, it should be noted that he made use of his gift as a peacekeeper more adeptly in the outside world than at home…The detergent-pink lake, aside from its dreamlike power, evokes the interior of Kosovar homes, where extreme cleanliness is de rigueur whereas the public space is treated with indifference. It is as though the inhabitants search for an unsullied space by ridding their homes of the traces that they cannot purge from the public – and political – space.

Yes but the sea is attached to the earth and it never floats around in space. The stars would turn off and what about my planet?, 2014Mixed media (earth, branches, fallen leaves, stones, soap)

Si Okarina e Runikut, 2014Brass, ocarina in clay, stone200 x 13.8 x 76 cm

Si Okarina e Runikut, 2014Brass, ocarina in clay, stone175 x 210 x 75 cm

Si Okarina e Runikut, 2014Brass, ocarina in clay, branche, stone130 x 150 x 52 cm

Installation views, all photos: Fabrice-Seixas

I’m hungry to keep you close. I want to find the words to resist but in the end there is a locked sphere. The funny thing is that you’re not here, nothing is.Kunsthalle Lisbon, Portugal2013 – 2014

Kunsthalle Lissabon presents I’m hungry to keep you close. I want to find the words to resist but in the end there is a locked sphere. The funny thing is that you’re not here, nothing is., the first solo show of Kosovo artist Petrit Halilaj in Portugal.

Petrit Halilaj was born in present day Kosovo in 1986. He is too young to remember the fall of the Berlin Wall, but old enough to remember the ensuing consequences of that historic moment for the geographic area that rapidly came to be known as “ex-Yugoslavia”. In questioning his own life experiences, the artist has come to reject pathos or any kind of nostalgia associated to his childhood memories of life as a refugee, privileg-ing instead a more optimistic and materially complex practice, which favours a more critical and politically relevant approach.

From the start of his artistic activity, Halilaj’s preference for ordinary materials and childhood memories have come to constitute an attempt to understand what notions of “home”, “nation” or “cultural identity” might mean. The way in which he frequently combines earth, rubble, wood, birds (especially domesticated birds like chickens or canaries) or delicate drawings, evokes a personal and utopic world. At the same time, it reveals the incontrovertible reality of a geo-political situation that is much vaster and all encompassing than any single subjective experience of the world.

For his first exhibition in Portugal, Petrit Halilaj will present the inner structure of the nest that previously formed the project he developed for the Republic of Kosovo’s first official representation in the Venice Bien-nale of 2013.

The exhibition at the Kunsthalle Lissabon recovers both the work’s title and the inner structure (made of wood panels and paint) of the installation. By moving this structure to Lisbon, these panels cease to operate as forms that construct and outline a space, and become the content of the project itself. Halilaj presents these architectural elements as both simple construction materials and as independent and autonomous objects, bearing the marks of their previous lives and usage.

For the original presentation in Venice, the panels were demarcating an inaccessible, closed space; a private nest for two canaries, which visitors could only peep at. Now, this space is open and accessible to the public, who are free to walk amongst the panels.

Furthermore, by situating these components in the exhibition context of the Kunsthalle Lissabon, which has been self-performing as an institution since its conception, the artist reflects on questions connected to the ways in which national or other representational logics are materialized in certain objects, and in the narra-tives they conjure.

All images: I’m hungry to keep you close. I want to find the words to resist but in the end there is a locked sphere. The funny thing is that you’re not here, nothing is, 2013-2014. Installation view. Various materials: panels and neon lights from Venice Biennale installation (2013, Kosovo Pavilion, Venice), bird excrement, iron legs, canary costumes.

Of course blue affects my way of shittingOpening reception April 26th, 2014Chert, Berlin

Chert is pleased to present the second solo show of Kosovarian artist Petrit Halilaj at the gallery. The title of the exhibition, of course blue affects my way of shitting, is taken from a text written by the artist, which is itself part of a bigger series of prose and poetry that Halilaj started writing in 2007. Many of the artist’s titles for previous exhibitions and artworks have come from these texts, which have never been presented in their entirety until now. The exhibition is accompanied by a new publication which collects the artist’s writing alongside his most recent series of drawings “Several birds fly away when they understand it.” Both the texts and drawings link together history and fantasy, reality and absurdity; a dichotomy at the core of the artist’s practice.

The texts reveal an intimate and personal history. As a collection they provide a unique insight into the artist’s brain, recounting memories of childhood, war, exodus, family, work, and contemplating his own identity, his sexuality, love, affections and emotions. Halilaj’s resolutely personal works simultaneously reflect on social and political events, understanding the struggle and impact they have on a singular life. But it is this intimacy within Halilaj’s practice that this exhibition at Chert focuses on; celebrating the more delicate and less evident side of the artist’s production.

The drawings from the series “Several birds fly away when they understand it” comprise images of the bird archive from the former Natural History Museum of Kosovo (whose story was the subject of his latest solo exhibition “Poisoned by men in need of some love” at WIELS Contemporary Art Center in Brussels); these birds have been modified by the artist, and painted with beautiful and exotic masks. Birds were also the subject of Halilaj’s installation presented at the 2013 Venice Biennale for the Kosovo Pavillion. “I’m hungry to keep you close. I want to find the words to resist but in the end there is a locked sphere. The funny thing is that you’re not here, nothing is,” filled the space with a huge nest, inside of which, a semi-hidden white room was home to two canaries, alter egos of the artist and his lover.

Together with the drawings in the downstairs of the gallery is “Cleopatra,” a rotating bulb which imitates the movement of insects at night, attracted to the light. This piece is also connected to the story of the defunct Museum of Pristhina, and especially to its collection of butterflies and insects. The lamp throws light on the drawings in the lower space of the gallery, which are lit only from the effect random movements.

On the upper floor you find a large rug, made by the artist’s mother in Kosovo. The rug would be plain, were it not for some chicken feet — as if a hen has just passed by. In the past, hens have been a predominant subject in Halilaj’s work: from the series of drawings “Bourgeois Hens,” to the sculptures “They are Lucky to be Bourgeois Hens,” and living hens have been present in his shows at Stacion, Pristhina; at the 2010 Berlin Biennale; and then again at the Rome Auditorium in 2011, as part of “Temporaneo,” organised by Nomas Foundation; and before that, in a group exhibition in Istanbul.

Finally, a collection of videos and documentation provide further background into the artist’s different proj-ects, giving a more total and intimate view of his artistic language.

I don’t have a Room, I don’t have a Mind.Nevermind!, 2014various cushions, different colors and sizes, canary costume, documentation ofvideos:-They are Lucky to be Bourgeois Hens (aquarium sculpture detail, 2008)-Space shuttle in the garden (2009)-Cleopatra (2011)-Because it is for you my Dear, and the Sky doesn’t see you and we can fall. Yes I am doing it for you, to see if you are free too (detail, 2011)-I’m hungry to keep you close. I want to find the words to resist but in the end there is a locked sphere. The funny thing is that you’re not here, nothing is (birds documentation, 2013)-I’m hungry to keep you close. I want to find the words to resist but in the end there is a locked sphere. The funny thing is that you’re not here, nothing is (cut from conversation with Skhurte Halilaj, 2013)Dimensions variable

Untitled (carpet), 2014Traditional ‘jan’ rug made by Shkurte Halilaj260 x 400 cm

Cleopatra (lamp), 2011-2013Electric motor, iron arm, light bulb, electric wire

Several birds fly away when they understand it, 2013Risograph printing and drawing on paperunframed: 30 x 20 cm

Several birds fly away when they understand it, 2013Risograph printing and drawing on paperunframed: 30 x 20 cm

Several birds fly away when they understand it, 2013Risograph printing and drawing on paperunframed: 30 x 20 cm

Several birds fly away when they understand it, 2013Risograph printing and drawing on paperunframed: 30 x 20 cm

14th July?Fondation d’entreprise Galeries Lafayette, ParisOpening Reception: October 24, 2013

The installation 14th July? by Kosovar artist Petrit Halilaj marks the kickoff of the Fondation d’entreprise Galeries Lafayette. It will be shown from 24th to 27th, October 2013 in the Fondation d’entreprise Galeries Lafayette’s premises before their complete refurbishment. Petrit Halilaj attracted much notice at the 2013 Venice Biennale, where he represented the Kosovar Pavilion. Now, for the first time, he is showing his work in France.Echoing his solo exhibition, underway at the WIELS in Brussels, Petrit Halilaj tells of the rediscovery of buried treasures at the Museum of Natural History of Pristina, Kosovo. A popular institution in the former Yugoslavia, that museum was then home to an amazing collection of stuffed animals. The collection was later put away, forgotten and left to rot in a walled-in cellar, replaced by national folklore exhibits.The film July 14th? takes center stage in the WIELS exhibition. Produced by Fonds de dotation Famille Mou-lin, Paris, this video installation documents every moment of the prodigious excavation initiated by the artist.Besides, Petrit Halilaj has manufactured exact copies of some of the stuffed animals, based on documents de-scribing their condition before decay. The ghostly presence of these copper earth phoenixes does carry some political overtones, but mostly conjures up the mythology of the “lost museum”, pointing to the possibility of symbolic rebirth and life for regenerated forms.

July 14th?, 2013Three-channel video, sound, Albanian language with English subtitles23 min

Poisoned by men in need of some love(Histioteuthis reversa, Octopus vulgaris, Phasianus colchicus, Natrix na-trix linné, two Tintenfish), 2013iron, cow excrement, soil, glue, brass300 x 80 x 80 cm

Poisoned by men in need of some love(Sardina pilchardus), 2013iron, cow excrement, soil, glue, brass100 x 200 cm

Poisoned by men in need of some loveCurated by Elena FilipovicWIELS, Contemporary Art Center, BrusselsOpening Reception: September 7, 2013

Petrit Halilaj (b. 1986 in Kostërrc) was too young to remember the Berlin Wall falling but just old enough to remember all too well what came in its wake in what quickly became the ‘former’ Yugoslavia: ethnic conflict, war, forced exile, corruption, loss. Having fled with his family to a refugee camp as a young boy during the conflict in Kosovo, Halilaj’s history is as inseparable from war and exodus as is his oeuvre. Much as he may mine his experience, he rejects pathos or nostalgia for something at once far more optimistic, materially complex, politically resonant and, ultimately, critical. From the start, his use of commonplace materials and childhood memories has been an attempt to understand what such notions as ‘home’, ‘nation’ and ‘cultural identity’ could mean. His frequent combinations of earth, rubble, wood slats, live chickens and delicate draw-ings evoke a world at once intimately personal and utopian, all while revealing the inevitable realities of a far wider sociopolitical sphere. A bit like Joseph Beuys’s felt and fat, Halilaj’s mnemotechny of homeland and homelessness is not documentary, strictly speaking, but it is not romantic either. Instead, it walks an elegant tightrope between memory and actuality, the ingenuous and the fictive, the infinitely personal and commonly shared experience.

For the artist’s first exhibition in Belgium and his largest solo show to date, Halilaj extends his ongoing exca-vation of the Natural History Museum in Kosovo, a formerly remarkable and well-loved place before splin-tered nationalisms disintegrated what was once called Yugoslavia. At WIELS, he presents a vast, new instal-lation comprised of a film that portrays the state of the ‘lost’ museum, along with a series of hand-sculpted copies of its animal remnants, based on a collection of found photographs and documents portraying the state they were in before they were removed to make way for a more nationalistic display of folk tradition and heritage instead. Halilaj’s new project attempts to give the museum and its specimens another life and a renewed political resonance.

The exhibition is organized by WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels and is curated by Elena Filipovic. An artist book will accompany the exhibition.

She, fully turning around, became terrestrial (stolen canary), 2013Taxidermy canary from the Museum of Natural History of Kosovo, with brassand paper mask made in collaboration with Alvaro Urbano

Poisoned by men in need of some love (Quattuor Bubo bubo), Poisoned by men in need of some love (single Bubo bubo), 2013Four + one owls made of iron, cow excrement, soil, glue, brass structure, single Bubo Bubo with small brass structureeach owl circa: 33 x 76 x 32 cmwhole installation circa: 400 x 350 x 50 cm

Poisoned by men in need of some love (Pavo cristatus), 2013iron, cow excrement, soil, glue, brass, wood374 x 99 x 42 cm

Poisoned by men in need of some love (Vitrines), 2013set of three Vitrines from the Museum of Natural History of Kosovo.Each: 187 x 103 x 54 cm

There I wait infinitely for the hurricane to come (with Anser anser), Several birds fly away when they understand it (3 Panels), 2013Cabinet from the Museum of Natural History of Kosovo, duck sculpture made of soil, excrement, glue, iron. Prints and drawings on inventory cards from the Museum of Natural History of Kosovofurniture: 184 x 116 x 50 cmduck: 55 x 71 x 29 cmeach paper: 30 x 30 cmeach panel: 90 x 90 cm

Poisoned by men in need of some love (Sus scrofa, Botaurus stellaris and Ardea cinerea), 2013Three animals made of iron, cow excrement, soil, glue, brass structurebird on top: 80 x 30 x 25 cmbird on floor: 64 x 29 x 17 cmwild boar: 75 x 123 x 27 cmwhole installation circa: 450 x 300 x 200 cm

July 14th?, 2013Three-channel video, sound, Albanian language with English subtitles23 min

A short introduction about the Natural Sector of the Museum of Kosovo.

In 1951 the Natural Sector opened as part of the Museum of Kosovo, and began to grow immediately, so much so that after five years it already had twelve employees. The number of specimens accumulated until the sector gained independence from the Museum of Kosovo, opening officially as the Museum of Natural Histo-ry of Kosovo around 1956. From this mo¬ment, the large collection of different species of natural organisms increased even more rapidly, alongside the organisation of a small zoo where deer, squirrels, foxes, wolves, bears, and other wild animals were kept. The museum existed independently until 1964, when the former di-rector retired, and with him half of the staff. After this period the Museum of Natural History was integrated once more as a department of the Museum of Kosovo.

The collection of the Natural Sector of the Museum of Kosovo was exhibited in the museum complex called ‘Emin Gjiku’, composed of four old houses which contained the carefully arranged museological treasures. The department of zoology comprised 850 entomological specimens including 27 fish specimens, 11 amphib-ians, 20 reptiles, 36 mammals, 577 winged animals belonging to 20 different categories, and 49 skeletons of other species. The department of botany also contained 222 different plant species. The Natural Sector had in total 1,812 specimens, some of which were lost during the war, when the Serbians transported them to Bel-grade. Before then, all these specimens were part of a unique, permanent exhibition developed over a period of almost 50 years.

Prior to the end of the war, there had never been anyone of Albanian ethnicity working as a professional in the department, hence the majority of the archive material was written in Serbian. What is more, the section was not widely known to the local public.After the war, and during the process of the department’s reactivation, I was appointed Director of the Sector. The conditions in which I found the museum were quite startling. I started to work first of all on restoring the garden, in which a large number of endemic plants grew, although they were already badly damaged. I pruned them, cultivated a number of new plants, and fixed up the place in general. The garden was the for-mer entrance to the exhibition which the public passed through before reaching the zoological specimens. Of course, the specimens that were inside the building were also badly damaged. I found specimens of animals discarded in the garden, and after I began to try to restore the damage, citizens reported that some specimens had even been found outside the garden. These reports were perhaps the first contacts and signs of interest from fellow citizens in reawakening this institution.

The next task that seemed appropriate was to examine all of the archive material and translate it into Alba-nian and Latin, and to prepare for the museum’s reopening to the public. The reopening generated a great deal of interest, including visits from all primary and secondary schools in Pristina. This for me was a real moment of joy: the visitors were very happy, and often during the guided tours, they interrupted me to ask where everything had been until now; they could not believe that all these interesting and beautiful things ex-isted in their city. Many schools also increased their weekly hours of biology lessons (to 18 hours for elemen-tary schools, and 12 hours for middle schools).

The Natural Sector of the Museum of Kosovo existed in these buildings until the 16th June 2001, when the contents started to be moved out, as ordered by a previous mandate, with the aim of giving space to the still existing Ethnographic Museum of Kosovo. As the person responsible for the department, I had many objec-tions to this idea. I tried hard to resist it, but there was not much that could be done. Every effort was useless, followed only by promises to re-open the department in a new dedicated space, which still does not exist to this day.

Everything was moved into the warehouses of the Museum of Kosovo, where it has remained until now in very bad condition, since there was no adequate storage space. It was not possible to access the materials or specimens, and many of them suffered water damage due to frequent leaks in the warehouses. I made many

requests to unlock the door, to no avail. One group of specimens was transported from one corridor to an-other, without my knowledge or permission.

Now, following the interest and insistence of Petrit Halilaj, these specimens have been pulled out of the warehouses and brought into the Museum of Kosovo in order to examine their condition. We invited some students from the University of Pristina to help with this process, and they have been working with great commitment. We found that a large number of specimens have been damaged or destroyed.

The collection of the Museum of Kosovo, which includes this sector, represents incredibly valuable material. It documents the diversity of botanical and zoological forms of life in the ethnology and biogeography of our region. The collection of winged animals consists of alost 600 specimens, and is a very valuable source of material that has yet to be seen in its entirety. Some of these birds are classified as very rare, not only in the Balkan region, but also at a European level, including: Grus-Grus, Plegadis falcinellus, Otis tarda, Platalea leucorodia, Gyps fulvus, and so on. It is the same for our mammals, a large portion of which are very rare specimens within Europe, such as our beautiful Lynx lynx.

The Natural Sector is an important facility for the public. Through its displays, people have a direct link to na-ture in this country. Its role and importance lies in the development of consciousness, as well as in the sphere of environmental conservation. Through exhibitions (whether permanent or temporary) and guided tours, visitors can access in-depth details of the now depleted flora and fauna of Kosovo, of its endemic diversity, the danger of its disappearance, and the strategies needed to protect these species.

29.07.2013Dr. sc. Safet Nishefci

I´m hungry to keep you close. I want to find the words to resist but in the end there is a locked sphere. The funny thing is that you´re not here, nothing is. Kosovo Pavilion, Venice Biennale Curated by Kathrin RhombergOpening Reception: June 1, 2013

Upon entering the space hosting the Kosovan contribution to the 55th Venice Biennial visitors find themselves abruptly confronted with a strange structure built, or rather woven of branches, twigs and rods gathered in Kosovo, its ground and walls covered with soil and mud. Taking up almost two-thirds of the space the structure seems an alien sight, an alien body, atavistic within the Biennial’s context of contemporary art; a foreign body migrated from some subconscious and forgotten era or territory into a vicinity that is nothing less than a renowned icon of the historic western world’s cultural and artistic achievements.As if the grounds were not to be entirely trusted, the object – not unlike the landing module of some spaceship – is not rested firmly on the floor but slightly above it on supporting iron legs instead, designed in the form of bird feet. The object’s detachment from the ground adds a certain ambiguity to its appearance, recalling vague ideas of some kind of primordial shelter or utopian spacecraft. Either way, there is an opening inviting those adventurous enough into the interior of the object.

With the musty, earthy smell intensified and the materiality of the object in branches and twigs far more tangible than when only contemplated from the outside, the narrow passageway reveals a hole in the wall, offering a peek into an interior space. This inner room’s walls shine bright white, contrasting sharply with the darkness of the exterior. A contrast so striking that it lends the room the quality of a totally separated inner world, a ‘mental space’. Its walls are not squared but rounded, their shape echoing the rounding of the object’s outer surface. Curiously enough the space is also a home for two canaries, which lived until recently in the studio of the artist. The mismatch between the size of the space and that of the birds makes it questionable as to whether this space was conceived and built for them. Why do the canaries inhabit such a space? Were they brought here to sound an early warning of a coming crisis, like the danger they would forecast in coalmines? Whom are they warning? Unfit to survive when free in nature, easy prey in their colourfulness for any predator, the canaries are only imaginable as being shepherded by human beings. One wonders who he might be.

One also wonders to whom the dress and empty clothes hangers – randomly hung on the wall and in branches from the ceiling – belong? A sensation of absence and also transition is present. It is as if someone and something is no longer present, or has not yet returned, or has simply not yet arrived. Despite its obvious personal and intimate nature, the space evokes a longing for a perspective, for an outlook of future schemes and prospects – an almost utopian desire that might also speak of the shared experience that preceded this project for the Venice Biennale.

As in previous projects, Petrit Halilaj initiated an open process in which his family, friends and other people close to him were actively involved. Triggered by his mother´s suggestion to develop a shelter within a structure, which would free his project from the pressure to represent an entire nation, the artist pushed the collective experiences of all the invited contributors to the limit, transforming them together with his own memories of a rural childhood in Kosovo and his experiences of a life between different worlds, realities and ideologies, into art…“all while revealing the inevitable realities of a far wider sociopolitical sphere”. (Elena Filipovic).

Petrit Halilaj’s project is the starting point of Kosovo´s first appearance at the Venice Biennale.

I’m hungry to keep you close. I want to find the words to resist but in the end there is a locked sphere. The funny thing is that you’re not here, nothing is, 2013Various materials, birds, branches, earth, metal, clothesDimensions variable

Installation views, photos: Atdhe Mulla Installation views, photos: Atdhe Mulla

Installation views, photos: Atdhe Mulla

Who does the earth belong to while painting the wind?!Curated by Giovanni Carmine, Kunsthalle Sankt Gallen, St. GallenOpening Reception: July 21, 2012

Petrit Halilaj (*1986) does not shy away from using his personal biography as a source for his work. The Kosovan artist’s childhood memories, centred on the drama of war and the subsequent refugee tragedy, are the motor for the creation of complex and often monumental installations. For those affected the search for an understanding of home is still a significant theme today. This is influenced both by world history as well as a personal definition of one’s own identity. In his artistic practice Halilaj uses simple materials such as earth but also live chickens and found archives from vanished museums in Kosovo to illustrate this permanent quest. His exhibitions are precisely conceived narrations that know how to move an audience.

At Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen Petrit Halilaj is presenting new works which are evidence of his continuous endeavour to find and show what has been lost and thereby to come closer to abstract concepts such as home and identity. Oversized reconstructions of various pieces of his mother’s jewellery will be on view at the exhi-bition. During the war she buried the original valuables along with her son’s childhood drawings in a casket on their land in Kosovo to protect them from looters. Alongside these large-format sculptures Halilaj is also showing the drawings which have survived. These impressively demonstrate how important the transforma-tion of experiences into art already was for him at a very early age. The jewellery and drawings are simultane-ously carriers of memories as well as elements that create identity in an exhibition which can also be read as a declaration of love for his mother and his home country.

The ruin of the family home in Kostërrc, which was destroyed in the war and which already played an im-portant role in earlier pieces, will also appear in St. Gallen in various forms. The house is a central element in Halilaj’s work which does not only raise questions about dealing with one’s personal past and one’s own understanding of home but also becomes a symbol of a national tragedy and evidence of global politics. The jewellery sculptures are thus created with pigments and building materials from the debris of the ruin. Other pieces of rock serve as seating for watching a video in which the ruin goes through gentle revitalisation: re-gardless of their fragility, butterflies breathe new life into the remains of the house and give expression to the hopeful attitude of the young artist.

It is the first time dear that you have a human shape (diptych II - earring), 2012metal, ruinseach earring: ø 350 cm

It is the first time dear that you have a human shape (spider), 2012Metal, house ruins130 x 500 x 300 cm

It is the first time dear that you have a human shape (diptych I - earring), 2012Metal and house ruins. Each earring is divided into two parts; the upper part thatgoes through the ear and the lower part that is a triangle shape.Upper parts: 203.8 x 132.2 cmLower triangles: 245.6 x 149.1 cm

It is the first time dear that you have a human shape (collier), 2012Metal structure, house ruinseach box: 25 x 23 x 22 cm total size when open: 40 m

Who does the earth belong to while painting the wind?!, 2012digital projection, seats made with house ruinsDimensions variableHD video: 13’ circa

Several Birds fly away when they understand it, 201231 artist’s drawings from childhood, metal frames, glass110 x 600 x 150 cmDimensions variable

Kunstraum InnsbruckCurated by Veit LoersOpening Reception: September 17, 2011

An enormous wheel rotates on the flat roof of Kunstraum Innsbruck. A disc, painted in the colors of the sky, transforms the ceiling into a celestial event. The disc is flat, suggesting the human experience of the ptolemaic world view as a vault. The installation is composed of a big iron and wooden structure mounted on the roof of the building and visible from the inside only through four windows in the ceiling. In order to experience it, the audience needs to betake themselves under the hanging wooden shafts through which they can see the painted sky, rotating counter clock-wise from night to day in a constant loop. The skylights provide a new form of presentation; where art is normally hung on the walls or standing on the floor, here the ceiling is used to display the work. Petrit Halilaj does not seem to be the one who blindly seeks to turn the time back into a nostalgic dimension that craves for the primitive world; yet the flames of a deep-seated longing to master time with some endurance are strongly felt, a longing to conserve the past as a metaphoric picture in the present.

Halilaj’s stories don’t need any reference. He is an inventor of objects, which in their presence and ambience, seem to come directly from a fantasy land – the Land of Oz – but still strongly connected to a more physi-cal reality. There are the bourgeois hens that talk about the polar star and live in a chicken-hut in the shape of a space shuttle (They are Lucky to be Bourgeois Hens I I, 2009); there is the parent’s house that Halilaj turned into a scaffolding like a collective memorial from a remote past (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); and there is the massive chunk of Kosovo earth shipped from Kosovo to Switzerland, together with a patch of grass that withers with time (Kostërrc (CH), 2011). In the current work as well, shown at Kunstraum Innsbruck, an existing natural phenomenon undergoes a transformation; the sky becomes a painted picture, almost like the weather itself. In the words of Immanuel Kant: „Der gestirnte Himmel über mir und das moralische Gesetz in mir“ (“The starred sky above me and the moral law inside me.”), Halilaj searches for what is hidden inside himself, in the language of art. „Sembra bruciare qualcosa dentro, sembra non dormire il stress fuori fredo, pioggia dentro caldo molto volcano sopra quella penna verde.“ (“It seems as if something is burning inside, the stress nev-er sleeps, it’s cold outside but it’s raining warm rain inside, very volcanic over this green feather.”) He calls them alberi (trees), those space shuttle-like objects, coated outside as well as inside with an abrasive fur, like an ostensory protected by glass with an almost glowing substance leaking through the floor. The outside is covered in nut tree branches and earth, inside ferrules, glass, and pigments mixed with sand. His drawings show similarities with Etruscan frescoes, a youth with an erect penis, looking up to the sky, the erection like a seed sprouting out of the earth, like a space shuttle made of flesh aiming for some lost time. On Nebra’s ce-lestial disc from the Bronze age there were marked, horizontal, arches on both the right and left side. The disc seemed to simultaneously enclose the earth and the sky.

In antiquity and the Middle Ages, people had astrolabes, which developed into the telescope during the 20th century. In his practice, Halilaj always aims to reverse this process of evolution.

A machine – an electronic motor with a wheel construction – is used to rotate the disk. Seeing is made diffi-cult. Halilaj’s TomTom navigator does not tell him where he is located and without the chip, his notebook is meaningless because he has no access to the Internet. Thrown back upon ourselves by our short-sightedness, the view is obscured by all the artifacts that come out of the civilization’s vision to reciprocate all existing im-ages. But it’s not only the transformation and displacement of meaning that drives the conceptual sculptor. In his process, he develops mental images and finds the appropriate template to melt them into a form. Then, he and his surroundings must find a place in it: the chickens, dogs, frogs, cats, flies, bugs and butterflies, even if the latter turned into dust, or tatters haning on pins, in a Natural History Museum storage in Pristina during long years without light. Everything must find a place in the final form of his mental images; to preserve the face of things, their memory, yet without aiming to display erudition. Not using the instrumental reason and

cognitive thinking, but to create conceptual works which can be re-interpreted with a sense of understanding. No, Petrit Halilaj has to stick to his pensée sauvage. Trying to bring water, earth and sky into one sculptural relation. „Si ma il mare sta attacato alla terra e non sta mai nello spazio.” (“Yes, but the sea is attached to the earth and never in the space itself.“)

Because it is for you my Dear, and the Sky doesn´t see you and we can fall. Yes I am doing it for you, to see if you are free too, 2011. Site specific installation, iron, plastic, 12 painted panels, wood, motor. Painting: ø 1200 cm. Wood constructions, each: 200 x 100 x 100 cm. Whole installation: Dimensions variable

Because it is for you my Dear, and the Sky doesn´t see you and we can fall. Yes I am doing it for you, to see if you are free too, 2011. Site specific installation, iron, plastic, 12 painted panels, wood, motor. Painting: ø 1200 cm. Wood constructions, each: 200 x 100 x 100 cm. Whole installation: Dimensions variable

Can we do something together, just this and then free forever (White), 2011. Metal, wood, glass, color pigment. 260 x 100 x 70 cm

Can we do something together, just this and then free forever (White), 2011. Metal, wood, glass, color pigment. 200 x 90 x 60 cm

StatementsArt Basel, with Chert, BerlinOpening Reception: November 27, 2011

Kostërrc (CH), 2011 consists of a hole (600 x 400 x 230 cm high) made in the Kostërrc hill in Kosovo. This hill is property of the Halilaj family and the original location of the house where the artist was born. The soil taken from the hole is transported to Basel, to nearly fill the booth at the fair. This “land for sale” relates both to many personal and intimate questions which are integral to the artist’s research, as well as to social and cultural problematics linked to the newborn state of Kosovo and its migration phenomena (with a particular relation to Switzerland).

The huge effort required to move the soil also becomes a symbol of the difficulties of migration and integra-tion, of the strong attachment to a culture which may become a self-detriment when preserved in another culture. With the gesture of bringing a piece of Kosovo to Switzerland, a country where one of the larger foreign community is actually from Kosovo, the artist not only tries to move its land into other surroundings – following the dream of many of its inhabitants – but he also brings the Kosovo community in Switzerland a little piece of their land. The process shows all the difficulties related to migration, and the near-impossibility of preserving an integrity from one context to another.

Later this summer, the piece will be on view at the Bonner Kunstverein in a different version. Some inherent characteristics of the building compelled to modifiy the presentation. For the institutional context, the “land for sale” has been removed and solely the apparatus produced by the artist for this project remains visible. This presentation shows traces of the activity of the artist. It displays loss and absence and draws a parallel with the original hole in the ground of the Kostërrc hill in Kosovo. In this sense, the piece, which appears as a strong gesture and heavy statement, reveals its poetic and resigned side, mirroring a human desire and ambi-tion which transcends any physical boundaries.

Kostërrc (CH), 2011 is composed of:Soil: circa 60 tons, divided into 66 big bagsGrass: 600 x 400 cm of grass sod, divided into 110 pieces, each one circa 30 x 60 cm18 meters of fair wall12 meters of metal structure wallHole: 600 x 400 x 230 cm

The places I’m looking for, my dear, are utopian places, they are boring and I don’t know how to make them real., 2010Wood, iron, various materialsInstallation view 6th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, Curated by Kathrin Rhomberg, Berlin

Untitled (from The Lamb´s Mother in the Creche?), 2008Ink and pencil on paperfolded: 75 x 60 cm Installation view 6th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, Curated by Kathrin Rhomberg, Berlin

They are Lucky to be Bourgeois Hens, 2008Aquarium, iron, elecricity, motors, featheraquarium: 60 x 40 x 50 cm (23 5/8” x 15 3/4” x 19 5/8”)iron leg: 120 x 40 x 100 cmInstallation view 6th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, Curated by Kathrin Rhomberg, Berlin

Back to the FutureCurated by Albert HetaStacion, Pristina Opening Reception: December 17, 2009

Stacion – Center for Contemporary Art Prishtina is proud to present the first solo exhibition in Kosova of Petrit Halilaj. Petrit Halilaj is born in Runik, Kosova (1986), lives and works between Runik, Berlin, Germany and Bozzolo, Italy.

Back to the future is about a project that has appeared in other locations in Europe the recent past, and will ‘land’ now in Stacion – Center for Contemporary Art Prishtina as an introduction of his practice in Kosovar context, the context where his main body of work has its base and originates from. In many levels this makes this project specific, complex and different from the rest of his body of work.

What is highly significant for us in this project is one short but representational voyage of an object carrying life and traveling from Runik to Prishtina. The trip is symbolic. The bigger part of Petrit Halilaj’s life and the life of the majority of the population of this country, is marked by relocation and displacement: forced to seek shelter from his home and village during the escalation of long occupation and war; deportation; returning home after the war; traveling away from his home and country for continuing his education; finding that home can be almost anywhere where you find love; successfully continuing his work in a very challenging international context and departing in a continuous quest for a better life for all.

But, what about moving chicken form a beautiful peripheral village in Kosovo to the capital city, a symbolic and illustrative for the direction of the relocation and internal migration in this project of a new country? Are the chicken a part of this caravan of aimed success and upgrade of our lives? Will they survive or will they be left behind, or will they return back home? What else will be left behind and lost? Is this a new test of the survivability of spaceflight before manned space missions were attempted?

This new-planed short voyage, an impressive young artist and his complex work, have invited us to reflect once again on several issues important for the development of our families and our society.For all his exhibitions, the voyage is accompanied by a mapping structure that archives discussions and pro-cesses.

Simultaneously, with this exhibition, the artist and the structures around him, are engaged in a unique pro-cess for all, that will take it’s next shape in late spring of 2010. For this exhibition, the future is intentionally left in the dark.

Back to the future is the way that I see Petrit Halilaj’s work with Stacion.

Albert HetaDecember 2009

They are Lucky to be Bourgeois Hens II, 2009. Wood, paint, electricity, chickens. 550 x 150 cm

They are Lucky to be Bourgeois Hens III, 2009wood, yellow neon, soil.120 x 60 x 70 cm

Solo exhibition Opening reception: September 19th, 2009

Chert is proud to present the first solo exhibition in Germany of Petrit Halilaj (Kosovo, 1986 – lives and works in Berlin).

For this occasion, the artist developed a project split into two separate parts: an installation realized in Berlin, parallel to the construction of a new chicken shack realized in Runik, Kosovo.The Berlin installation “26 Objekte n’ Kumpir” 2009, is constituted by four big vitrines, arranged as a table or the shape of an open book, the contents of which display a reproduction of various objects belonging to the artist’s family.Splitting as well this sculpture in two parts – its inside and outside – the artist traces a precise connection between the content, the container and the construction in Kosovo.“26 Objekte n’ Kumpir” is the display for the story told by the objects inside. At the same time it is a launch pad for the space shift and, on another level, a comfortable nest. Its content is a collection of various objects, all of them reproduced by the artist following the original ones realized by his granfather during the last years.The chicken shack realized in Kosovo follows the shape of a space shuttle. This form is the result of a conver-sation the artist recently had with his sister Blerina – to be published in Gagarin (Gagarin n. 19 – September 2009). Both the Berlin and the Kosovo constructions present themselves as raw, soiled, home-made contain-ers on the outside, while the insides are precious, accurate and well-refined.

The connection between one installation and the other is strong and complementary. The shapes and ideas have deep utopian, fictional and fantastic connotations, but also carry very intimate sensations of protection, coziness, home and family.

26 Objekte n’ Kumpir, 2009. Vetrines, wood, copper, neons, various objects, soil. Video documentation from “They are Lucky to be Bour-geois Hens II”, Kosovo, 2009. Pencil on paper, tape

Space shuttle in the garden2008Ink and pencil on Paper, wood footboard from Murano glass laboratory.50 x 46 x 11 cm

Bathroom wall, water pipes, shower rail2008Wood, paint, shower´s pipe in metal and plastic, copper pipes.Various objects.wood wall: 220 x 160 x 1 cmshower rail: 90 x 90 x 90 cmwater pipes: 40 x 364 cmobjects´ line: 40 x 550 x 40 cmInstallation view: The Lamb´s Mother in the Creche?, Chert, Berlin, 2008

Bathroom wall, water pipes, shower rail2008Wood, paint, shower´s pipe in metal and plastic, copper pipes.Various objects.wood wall: 220 x 160 x 1 cmshower rail: 90 x 90 x 90 cmwater pipes: 40 x 364 cmobjects´ line: 40 x 550 x 40 cm

They are Lucky to be Bourgeois Hens2008Aquarium, iron, elecricity, motors, featheraquarium: 60 x 40 x 50 cmiron leg: 120 x 40 x 100 cm

Drawings - selection

Un gallo borghese che voleva essere un pappagallo fino a quando ha potuto capire che poteva essere un gallo. E la sua moglie. (A bourgeois cock who wanted to be a parrot until he could understand that he could be a cock. And his wife)2010drawings on paper, wood frameeach drawing: 28.5 x 20.5 cmwood frame: 55 x 31 cm

Bourgeois Hen2010drawings on paper28.5 x 20.5 cm

Bourgeois Hen2010drawings on paper28.5 x 20.5 cm

Bourgeois Hens2010drawings on paper, each 28.5 x 20.5 cm

Bourgeois Hen2010drawings on paper28.5 x 20.5 cm

Bourgeois Hen2010drawings on paper28.5 x 20.5 cm

Bourgeois Hen2012drawings on paper28.5 x 20.5 cm

Bourgeois Hen2013drawings on paper28.5 x 20.5 cm

Bourgeois Hen2012drawings on paper28.5 x 20.5 cm

Bourgeois Hen2013drawings on paper28.5 x 20.5 cm

Bourgeois Hens (Series)2013carbon paper transfers on paperEach: 29.7 x 21 cm