ART-PRESENTATION: Petrit Halilaj

Petrit Halilaj 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.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Galerie kamel mennour Archive

The history of Petrit Halilaj’s life is marked by uprooting and trauma, deeply linked to his country of origin, Kosovo. The childhood experience of war and the escape and disorientation of one’s family is reflected in works that often start from a personal story and then deepen wider issues, through its optimistic, poetic and often ironic practice. Two solo exhibitions of Petrit Halilaj are on presentation at Galerie kamel mennour: “ABETARE (Fluturat)” in Paris and “Do you realise there is a rainbow even if it’s night ?!” in London. In Paris Petrit Halilaj presents his series of works “ABETARE ”.  The title stems of the artist’s alphabet book, where each letter of the alphabet is associated with a drawing and a corresponding word. Like all the children of his generation, Halilaj learned Albanian language on it, while attending primary school in the Kosovar village of Runik . At the time the oppression of the ethnic Albanian population of. The book became an essential part of their cultural identity and each generation would pass it on to the next one. In Halilaj’s work a one-to-one reproduction of the book is playfully exposed page after page as a wallpaper, recalling the familiar process of learning, whereby, beside the alphabet, the foundations of society are taught through the representation of scenes from everyday life. Also on presentation is a large-scale site-specifi installation composed of 12 school desks and several steel sculptures. The school tables come his Primary School “Shotë Galica”. The green surface of the desks and the wooden benches were covered with thousands of drawings, inscriptions, carvings and scribbles left by several generations of school kids. The artist then used thin steel rods to reproduce greatly enlarged versions of doodles and drawings once left behind by pupils on the seats and desks of the classrooms. In spite of their clearly sculptural form, the objects still preserve a graphic character and develop an effect suggesting delicate drawings in space. The depicted motifs include houses, hearts, birds, flowers, cars, aeroplanes, rockets and rifles, and they are simultaneously witness to the hopes, yearnings and dreams and to the doubts, fears and worries of the children and adolescents of that time. For “Do you realise there is a rainbow even if it’s night ?!” that is on presentation at kamel mennour in London, Petrit Halilaj has made an installation based on the project he presented for the 57th Venice Biennale. In 2009, Halilaj found in an abandoned reserve in the Natural History Museum a collection of Lepidoptera. The discovery led first of all to a series entitled “Cleopatra”. In London, the sheet of paper in Halilaj’s drawings, is like a space in which the insects seem to be resting, also the artist made cases for each of them out of recycled wooden crates and packed them under traditional Kilim rugs that partly cover, partly reveal them.

Info: galerie kamel mennour, 47, rue Saint-André des arts, Paris, Duration: 1/12/17-4/1/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00 and galerie kamel mennour, 51 Brook Street, London, Duration: 22/11/17-4/1/18, Days & Hours: Mon-Sat 10:00-18:30, www.kamelmennour.com