highlights

26

Bourgeois H

en, 2012 C

ourtesy of the artist and Chert, B

erlin

PETRIT

HALILAJ’s work as rejecting pathos in

favor of an intimate and critical

inflection of the political.

Elena Filipovic frames

By means of impertinent

gestures, commonplace

materials and memories of

his refugee childhood,

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28

It is the first time dear that you have a hum

an shape (diptych I – earring), 2012 C

ourtesy of the artist and Chert, B

erlin Photography by G

unnar Meier

Biography

PETRIT HALILAJ (b. 1986, Kostërrc) lives and works in Berlin, Kosovo and Mantua. Halilaj has had solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Sankt Gallen, St. Gallen; Kunstraum Innsbruck; and Chert, Berlin. He has also been featured in group exhibitions at Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Milan; Museion, Bolzano; Kunstverein Nürnberg; Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn; New Museum, New York; and Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster. In addition, Halilaj participated in the 6th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, Berlin.

Current & Forthcoming

PETRIT HALILAJ will be represent Kosovo at the 55th Biennale di Venezia. Solo exhibitions of his work will be featured at WIELS Contemporary Art Center, Brussels, and National Gallery of Prishtina. Additionally, Halilaj is participating in group exhibitions at Fürstenberg Zeitgenössisch, Donaueschingen; and Museum Schloss Moyland, Bedburg-Hau.

Who can forget all that dirt? Sixty tons of it, crammed within the flimsy drywall perimeter of a small booth in Art Basel’s Statements section in 2011. It was an impertinent gesture; the banal pile of earth refused to be the luxury commodity one has come to expect at such art fairs and yet it outweighed even its most heroic and monumental neighbors. At one point, Art Basel’s organizers even considered reinforcing the flooring beneath the stand to keep the work from crushing the fair’s entire floor, a constant threat that slyly offered its own form of institutional cri-tique. Although this act, like so many of the artist’s works, might evoke the aes-thetics of Arte Povera or Land Art, or even a specific precedent like Walter De Maria’s Earthroom (1968/1977), Kosovar artist Petrit Halilaj inflects his dirtwork with an altogether different set of references. Entitled Kostërrc (CH), the earth was taken from the precise location where the artist’s family home was destroyed dur-ing the war, leaving behind a barren gash in the ground. It was then transported to politically “neutral” Switzerland, no small or ambiguous undertaking, especially considering that each of these vastly different places traffics in a political rhetoric that connects blood and soil to contentious notions of nation, territory and iden-tity. Halilaj (b. 1986 in Kostërrc) was too young to remember the fall of the Ber-lin Wall, but just old enough to remember all too well what came in its wake in the soon-to-be “former” Yugoslavia: a landscape marked by ethnic conflict, war, forced exile, corruption and loss. Having fled with his family to a refugee camp as a young boy during the conflict in Kosovo, the artist has a history as inseparable from war and exodus as is his resulting oeuvre. Yet even as he mines his own expe-rience, his body of work rejects pathos or nostalgia in favor of something more optimistic, materially complex, politically resonant, and, ultimately, critical. From the start of the young artist’s practice, Halilaj has used commonplace materials and childhood memories in adroit drawings, atmospheric sculptures and often monumental installations. These works evoke a world at once intimately personal and utopian (note the recurrence of his homemade earth and twig-lined space-ships, suggesting a fantasy of a little boy’s intergalactic escape), all while revealing the inevitable realities of the far wider sociopolitical sphere that his materials and forms allude to. Halilaj’s first project in Berlin, where the artist moved after finishing art school in Italy, was the result of his having transformed a space in Kreuzberg slated to become a new gallery into an entirely operational, if makeshift, temporary resi-dence in the run-up to the first show. There he constructed all the amenities of a home, including plumbing, bathroom, kitchen and bedroom, a welcoming environ-ment to temporarily house and reconnect him with his father, who was told that this was his son’s actual home. Halilaj had erected the elaborate fiction because years of exile had left father and son with little chance to be together outside of a homeland already too loaded with difficult memories. Only once his father departed did the artist admit that the whole situation had been a meticulous ruse, the living resi-due and material traces of which comprised Bathroom wall, water pipes, shower rail (2008), Halilaj’s contribution to Chert gallery’s inaugural exhibition “The Lamb’s Mother in the Creche.” Just over a year later, the artist used his biennial artist budget to attempt to reconstruct his war-torn family home just outside of Pristina in response to cura-tor Kathrin Rhomberg’s call to reflect on reality in the 6th Berlin Biennial (2010). His proposal was not art imitating life or even the inverse, but real life made into an

The places I’m looking for, m

y dear, are utopian places,they are boring and I don’t know

how to m

ake them real, 2010

Courtesy of the artist and C

hert, Berlin

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art form. He transported the remnants of wood slat and brick from the attempted reconstruction of his former home in Pristina, which was beset by a saga of local corruption and mafia intervention, and erected a ghostly, monumental structure in Berlin that echoed the loss and undoing of the faraway original, shown at twenty percent larger than life size. Live chickens similar to those that surrounded Halilaj during his rural childhood roamed alongside the structure, offering just one exam-ple of the everyday and memory-laden stuff that so frequently recur in his oeuvre. Cleopatra (2011) perfectly evinces the subtle but undeniably ideological implica-tions of the artist’s practice. The installation comprises partially destroyed, dusty museological specimens, including a number of small glass cases displaying butter-flies and other insects complete with the original hand-written labels listing their species name. These are the central protagonists in the artist’s ongoing excavation and presentation of some of the remains of the Natural History Museum in Koso-vo, a formerly remarkable and well-loved place before splintered nationalisms dis-integrated what was once called Yugoslavia. These abandoned butterfly specimens, like the various stuffed animals that the artist has also recently turned his atten-tion towards, are in their own way victims of the post-war urge to use the space of the Natural History Museum to display folk tradition and heritage in place of the museum’s usual contents. The shoring up of a clear sense of Kosovar national iden-tity, distinguished from its ethnically diverse neighbors, is a maneuver officially understood as infinitely more pressing than the fate of the animal, insect or other specimen belonging to the former museum. Halilaj’s attempts to save and display the collection, whose neglect might seem to sit outside of ideology, quietly points to the consequences of the new nation’s prioritization of one kind of cultural herit-age at the cost of another. The artist’s personal inflection of the political will perhaps receive its most appropriate platform at the upcoming Venice Biennale. With his first institutional solo exhibitions at the Kunstraum Innsbruck (2011) and Kunst Halle Sankt Gal-len (2012) behind him, and in the midst of preparing for even larger solo shows at WIELS Contemporary Art Centre and the National Gallery of Kosovo, the artist will “represent” his homeland in the very first Pavilion of the Republic of Kosovo in Venice. Kosovo is a nation that still struggles—two decades after the end of the bloody struggle that formed it—to solidify itself as an entity and identity, and to come to terms with its war-torn history. The choice of Halilaj, who builds his work from the very rubble of this history, could not be more apt. Perhaps fittingly, the artist will construct a structure within a structure on the real estate allotted to him, his enclosure covered with twigs and earth gathered from Kosovo and filled with the drawings, objects and narratives that propagate the young artist’s singular uni-verse. These in turn speak for the particularities of a place and a history at once both geographically near and metaphorically far from the art world playground that is Venice during the Biennale, reminding us that the stakes of art, like life, run deeper than they sometimes seem. Still, like Beuysian felt and fat, Halilaj’s mne-motechny of both homeland and homelessness is neither, properly speaking, docu-mentary nor romantic. Instead, it walks an elegant tightrope between memory and actuality, the ingenuous and the fictive, the personal and the shared experience of all of us who know what it is to have lost our innocence and yet continue to marvel at the magic still left in the world.

Author

ELENA FILIPOVIC is Senior Curator at WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels. She co-curated the 5th Berlin Biennial with Adam Szymczyk in 2008 and has curated a number of exhibitions with artists ranging from Marcel Duchamp, Felix-Gonzalez-Torres, and Alina Szapocznikow to Leigh Ledare, Klara Lidén, Melvin Moti, and Tris Vonna-Michell.

Kostërrc (C

H), 2011

Courtesy of the artist and C

hert, Berlin