Petrit Halilaj

Petrit Halilaj is a Kosovar visual artist living and working among Germany, Kosovo, and Italy. The name "Petrit" literally means "Falcon". His work is based on documents, stories, and memories related to the history of Kosovo.
With his husband Alvaro Urbano, Halilaj is a joint tutor at Beaux-Arts de Paris, in Paris, France.

Early life

Born in SFR Yugoslavia, now Kosovo, Halilaj left the country at the age of 13 with his family during the Yugoslav Wars of 1991–2001. At a refugee camp in Albania, a team of Italian psychologists, hoping to help the children process the trauma of the war, gave Halilaj felt-tip markers, with which he began to make drawings about his experiences.
Settled in Italy, Halilaj studied at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan.

Career

During the 6th Berlin Biennale in 2010, Halilaj exhibited a sculptural reconstruction of a house built by his parents, to replace the family home that was levelled by bombing during the 1998–1999 Kosovo war.
Halilaj represented the Republic of Kosovo at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013.
Halilaj had several solo exhibitions, including one at the New Museum in New York in 2017–2018 and one at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in 2018–2019.
Halilaj created a large site-specific installation of giant sculptural flowers in 2020 for Madrid's Palacio de Cristal.
In 2020 Halilaj dropped out of the 58th, claiming that the, which organises it, would not recognize his Kosovar nationality.
In July 2021, Halilaj and Urbano collaborated on an installation of "huge fabric flowers" at the Kosovo National Library to celebrate the 5th annual Kosovo Pride Week.
According to the New York Times:
In October 2021, an exhibit opened at Tate St Ives of an installation by Halilaj inspired by his youthful marker drawings done in the refugee camp.
In the exhibit, visitors walk among hanging cutouts of images from the drawings blown up to a huge scale. Approached from the entrance, the cutouts show "a fantasy landscape of exotic birds and palm trees," but when the visitors turn back to the entrance, "they find that some of the suspended forms have been printed on the reverse with a more macabre selection of Halilaj's doodles: soldiers, tanks, wailing figures, burning houses."

Exhibitions

2009 – Back to the Future, curated by Albert Heta, at Stacion – Center for Contemporary Art Prishtina, Pristina, Kosovo
2018–2019 – Hammer Projects: Petrit Halilaj, organised by adjunct curator Ali Subotnick and curatorial associate MacKenzie Stevens, at Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA, USA
2018–2019 – Shkrepëtima, curated by Leonardo Bigazzi, at Fondazione Merz, Turin, Italy
2020 – To a raven and hurricanes that from unknown places bring back smells of humans in love, Palacio de Cristal, Madrid
2023 – Runik, Museo Tamayo, Mexico City, Mexico
2024 – The Roof Garden Commission: Abetare, at Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA
2024 – Ensamble lunar para mares al alza, at MACBA, Barcelona, Spain

Collections

Centre Pompidou, Paris, France
, Turin, Italy
Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA
Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland
Tate Modern, London, UK

Awards

Halilaj received the Mario Merz Prize and a special mention of the jury at the 57th Venice Biennale, both in 2017. He did a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, Washington, D.C. in 2018. Halilaj received the Kunstpreis Berlin awarded by the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, in 2023. On 2 October 2025, Halilaj was named the 2027 Nasher Prize Laureate by the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Texas. The Prize comes with a "$100,000 and the opportunity to devise public programming with the Nasher Sculpture Center."