Abetare, Petrit Halilaj

This exploration of Petrit Halilaj's site-specific installation reflects the artist's personal experience as a refugee of war and the universal hopes and fears captured in children's drawings.

Kosovar artist Petrit Halilaj (born 1986, Kostërc, former Yugoslavia) creates complex, immersive installations that claim space for freedom, desire, intimacy, and identity while expressing his wish to alter the course of personal and collective histories. In his first major outdoor installation, the artist reflects on his experience as a refugee and explores the intersection of reality and fantasy through the rich world of children's drawings.

This volume examines Halilaj's inspiration for the work in found inscriptions, carvings, and scribbles collected from desks at his former primary school and other schools in Eastern Europe—a record of young people's fantasies, fears, and private messages conveyed in many languages. An interview with Halilaj connects his practice with those of artists such as Louise Bourgeois and Julio González, situates this project within his broader career, and considers how memory, identity, and history present in his work.

This publication reveals his new installation to be at once a story of children in a time and place marked by social and political conflict and a universal reflection on youthful imagination, hopes, yearnings, anxieties, and dreams.

Abetare, Petrit Halilaj is published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and distributed by Yale University Press.

Exhibition schedule:

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
(April 30–October 27, 2024)