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Petrit Halilaj

Petrit Halilaj & Álvaro Urbano 10th of May 2016 (Cherry), 2020 Stainless steel, canvas, acrylic paint, thread 270 x 450 x 450 cm, each blossom

#Petrit Halilaj #Álvaro Urbano

PETRIT HALILAJ

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?

#petrit halilaj

For Petrit Halilaj's installation Abatare at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, he used children's doodles found on desks at his former school in Kosovo to create sculptures that bring these drawings to life around the outdoor garden. As a former refugee these drawings he found were personal to him and you can sense that in the way they are grouped together, and his use of birds and flowers.

From the museum-

Halilaj was inspired by children’s doodles, drawings, and scribblings found on desks at the school he attended in Runik, Kosovo. For The Met commission, he expanded his research to other schools in Albania and countries from the former Yugoslavia, which are now undergoing significant cultural and sociopolitical change. Furtive drawings from kids’ desks have been enlarged into three-dimensional metal sculptures, each retaining the trace of the original. Together, they bring to public view the collective memory and imaginative power of generations of students whose lives were marked by traumatic conflicts and territorial divisions. Kosovo experienced the last of a series of wars in the Balkan region in the 1990s, during which many children were denied access to education on ideological grounds. Abetare borrows its title from the book the artist and his peers used to learn the alphabet at school, each letter linked to a lesson in pictures and text.

In Abetare, culturally specific references to different political ideologies, religions, and local heroes coexist with more universal symbols and playful nods to pop culture, art history, and sports. Spread around The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden, the “drawings in space” merge with the surrounding architecture and landscape to create a multivocal scenography with an open-ended narrative. A celebration of the shared impulse for personal expression and mark making, Abetare is an opportunity for discovery and an invitation to expand our capacity to imagine transformative futures.

In the video below from The Met, Halilaj discusses the work with curator Iria Candela, including the discovery of the desks, and shares some of his personal history.