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Through art, I’ve always been saving my life,” says Petrit Halilaj. “It was always a way out and a window to imagination and dreaming and telling stories.”
Born in 1986 in what was then Yugoslavia and is now Kosovo, Halilaj was 13 when his family home was burned to the ground by Serbian troops; he and his family—he has four younger siblings—were later placed in an Albanian refugee camp. It was here that a visiting Italian psychologist, Giacomo “Angelo” Poli, gave drawing paper and felt-tip pens to a group of kids and told them to draw their fears and dreams. The 38 drawings that Halilaj did in response—half of them of birds in idyllic landscapes, the other half of burning houses, tanks, and Serbian soldiers with guns and bloody knives from the massacres he had witnessed—eventually fueled one of the most electrifying and humanistic careers in contemporary art.
Halilaj is now a conceptual artist whose seductive and often childlike sculptures, drawings, installations, and performances tell highly personal stories about a world in which refugee crises, homelessness, and wars are common occurrences. Since his work appeared at the Berlin Biennale in 2010, Halilaj has represented Kosovo at the Venice Biennale and had solo shows at the New Museum in New York, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, Tate St. Ives in England, and many others around the world. This month, he is installing a major project on the roof garden of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. When we connect, he has just returned to his house in Berlin after a week of teaching at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. (He also lives and works in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, and in Italy.) A blond, slim, wiry figure with a prominent nose, he speaks fast and laughs often. Halilaj is not supposed to discuss the Met project in advance, but his enthusiasm for it brims over.
“Even if I cannot tell you exactly what it will come there,” he says, in his voluble but sometimes inscrutable English, “what I’m bringing is more this sense of building a personal map and trajectory of my life and dreams and imagination with reality. It’s actually coming from my experience of the last two years, traveling not only back to Kosovo, but to Albania, Montenegro, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, all these countries that I was very scared of before.” He began this journey in Albania, where his refugee camp had been, and continued with many visits to schools in small towns. “I thought knowing more people and more places in the region will help me to heal and see a possible togetherness. The wars showed how unrespected many minorities were. And I feel that, through culture, we can bring people to a new conversation.” He tells me he’s collecting “an ensemble of sculptures that will come from very different backgrounds”
for The Met’s roof garden. “They will sustain each other sculpturally, blend together in kind of a chorus that makes a new song.”
The exhibition, which he was invited to take on by Sheena Wagstaff, head of modern and contemporary art at The Met until a year ago, opens on April 30, and will be there for much of the year. “The story Petrit is telling is always his story, but it’s also our society’s story,” Max Hollein, The Met’s director, tells me. “He gives you a very emotional and individual experience and, through his art, makes it something that a whole generation can relate to. And that makes
it extremely powerful.”
Growing up in the small village of Runik in northern Kosovo, Halilaj could draw before he could talk. He could sketch two pictures at once, using both hands, and he got a lot of attention for it. Kosovo had lost its autonomy in the late 1980s, when Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic seized control. The Albanian majority in Kosovo, to which the Halilaj family belonged, was persecuted and forced “to live in parallel systems, hidden and underground,” he remembers. It was dangerous for Halilaj and his four younger siblings to play in public spaces or even go to school. His family and all the other ethnic Albanians in the region were systematically forced out of the country. “My house was burned in early ’98, then my grandparents’ house in early ’99. They imprisoned my father and all the other men in surrounding villages, and then we were forced to walk for days until we finally arrived in Albania. We ended up in refugee camps in Kukës, one of the first cities after you cross the border.”
It was a grim and dull environment, but Halilaj “found a lot of happiness” with his brothers and sisters because of their mother’s love and creative imagination. “My mom has an artist’s mind,” he tells me. (Their father had been a cartographer; their mother made clothes for women on her home sewing machine.) This is where Halilaj met Angelo, the Italian psychologist, who encouraged him to make drawings. “The way he talked to us, he was really able to make us share experiences,” Halilaj remembers, “which is the beginning of healing after a trauma.” Angelo was only there for two weeks, but when he left Halilaj wrote to him, and Angelo, who saw his talent and had kept all his drawings, wrote back. They corresponded for several years. When Kofi Annan, the then secretary-general of the United Nations, visited Halilaj’s refugee camp, Halilaj showed him a large drawing of a child watching a massacre. “I made it to ask Kofi to stop the war,” he tells me. The scene was captured on Albanian television.
When the war ended, Halilaj and his family returned to Kosovo and struggled to restart their lives. Halilaj went to an art school in nearby Peja, a larger town, where he fell in love with painting, sculpture, and art history. He longed to study in Italy, and talked about this in the letters he was still writing to Angelo. When Halilaj was 17, Angelo and his wife invited him to come and live with them and their 20-year-old daughter. For the next four years, Halilaj attended the Brera Academy of Fine Art in Milan and stayed with Angelo and his family on weekends.
He also came out as gay. “I knew I was gay,” he says, “but I never could tell anyone in Kosovo. I never saw two gay men in Kosovo together. But in Milan, there was a whole community.” The world of contemporary culture opened up to him in Italy, not just visual art but literature and cinema, especially Pasolini and Fellini. He went to Turin and discovered arte povera through the work of Alighiero Boetti, Mario Merz, and Marisa Merz. He remembers thinking, “Wow, you can use all these materials that come from reality to express how we understand the world. I don’t want to do just painting. I want to tell stories through everything you have around.”
In 2010, having graduated from Brera Academy and moved to Berlin, Halilaj participated in the Berlin Biennale. It was his debut show on the global stage. When he learned that he’d be given a budget of about 30,000 euros for his Biennale contribution, he realized he could use part of the money to help build the house that his parents dreamed of having in Pristina, in order to give their younger children better educational opportunities. The piece he made for the Biennale was a life-size replica, a ghost image of the framework of their long-lost house. It was exhibited with live chickens roaming around and through it, just as they had been back in Halilaj’s childhood home, and it bore one of his long poetic titles: The places I’m looking for, my dear, are utopian places, they are boring and I don’t know how to make them real. The actual Pristina house was eventually finished by his parents. “My parents currently live in it,” he says, “and my four siblings were also there until they moved out.” Elena Filipovic, who curated a Halilaj show at Wiels Contemporary Art Center in Brussels in 2013, describes his Berlin exhibition as “not art imitating life or even the inverse, but real life made into an art form.”
Chickens have played a large part in Halilaj’s art and life. “I talked to chickens as a chicken, in their language, when I was a kid,” he says. For a group show in Istanbul in 2008, he lived with chickens in a house he had built in a children’s playground. (The piece is titled They are Lucky to be Bourgeois Hens.) And he began his ongoing drawing series of Bourgeois Hens—pencil sketches of fowl with a regal manner—in 2009. Halilaj’s mantra is coexistence. He wasn’t allowed to bring live chickens to “Runik,” his current show at the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City, where he has reinstalled his Berlin Biennale ghost house. Instead, he brought 50 examples of the birds and creatures and costumes that he had made over the past 13 years. “The costumes are alter egos that tell stories,” he explains. (He wears them and performs at openings—he’s been a white raven, a chicken, a raccoon, a moth, among other life forms.) As part of the show, he painted a large-scale chicken spreading its wings in flight on the body of an Aeroméxico Boeing 737. The plane became what he calls “a political flying chicken,” crossing borders throughout the Americas without a visa.
In 2011, at Berghain, the famously louche techno club in Berlin, the artist Álvaro Urbano danced up to Halilaj and said, “Are you the chicken guy?” They met again two months later. Soon after that, they started living together, along with 12 uncaged and free-flying canaries. In 2020 they married in a joyous celebration in their studio and home. “It was the most emotional and beautiful day of my life,” Halilaj says.
Nine months later, their joint installation “Forget Me Not,” a spectacle of giant fabric flowers suspended from a glass dome ceiling, opened at the National Library of Kosovo in Pristina. It was timed to coincide with the fifth annual Pristina Pride Week. All the flowers had some connection to the artists’ lives, including an exact replica of the lily that was in their engagement bouquet. Halilaj has been in the forefront of the gay rights movement, lobbying the prime minister of Kosovo for LGBTQIA+ rights, especially the right to marry, in the new civil code that is being written. “This law is extremely important to ensure that the whole society will have the same rights,” Halilaj says, “and that there is space for everyone to love and to live.” Once a year, Halilaj and Urbano travel to a country they’ve never been to before. They spent Christmas this year in Morocco, with three days in the desert and no phones, and then, on the way home, went to Madrid for New Year’s celebrations with Urbano’s large Spanish family.
Filipovic, who will soon be the director of the Kunstmuseum in Basel, has been and remains one of Halilaj’s most intuitive advocates. “It’s rare to find art (and an artist) that is at once bitingly critical and unabashedly hopeful,” she tells me. “He maintains a childlike wonder without for a moment being naive about the political forces that incite war, that divide ethnicities, and that ultimately are fueled by interests of power.”
On The Met’s roof garden, there can be very high winds. Halilaj was amused to find in his contract with the museum a clause specifying the art should be able to survive hurricanes. “The stories I deal with in my art come from a very difficult history, but normally they go to a safe place in a museum. It’s funny to think that my sculptures should have to survive hurricanes at The Met. So sculpturally, metaphorically, these works that represent very different ethnic backgrounds, will bend together, supporting each other, to survive a hurricane.”