EN
*1986 in Skenderaj-Kosovo
*1983 in Spain
both live and work in Berlin, Germany
Petrit at Night 1, 2020
Petrit at Night 2, 2020
Petrit at Night 3, 2020
Wood, metal, sound
Courtesy of the artist and Chert Lüdde, Berlin
Alvaro at Night 1, 2020
Alvaro at Night 2, 2020
Wood, metal, sound
20 x 23 x 36 cm
Courtesy of the artist and Kamel Mennou, Paris, London
Alvaro at Night 3, 2020
Wood, metal, sound
Courtesy of the artist and
Travesia Quatro, Mexico
Petrit Halilaj‘s research could be considered as part of the artistic and literary current of magical realism, in which reality and imagination, political and folkloric elements, as well as personal and collective memories mingle. Petrit Halilaj operates with his traumatic past, which connects his personal experience with the history of his country of origin, Kosovo. His practice consists in reappraising the past transforming it into an imaginative universe to awaken collective and personal consciousness. In Halilaj‘s practice, elements of reality are transformed into a symbolic dictionary that includes birds, canaries and chickens, the nest, the ocarina – a Neolithic musical instrument, moths, etc.
In the context of the Bienniale Gherdëina 7, Petrit Halilaj and Alvaro Urbano (*1986, Kosovo/*1983, Spain) present the work Petrit at Night/Alvaro at Night, for which the artists made bird houses and placed photographs of each other in them while they slept. Each of the bird houses contains either Halilaj‘s or Urbano‘s sounds of snoring and sleeping, and thus merges as a subtle, playful and intimate interlude with the urban environment.
As part of the exhibition in the Sala Trenker, Petrit Halilaj moreover is showing an installation of fishes, formed from a mixture of soil and animal dung, that reacts to the destruction of the natural history museum at the time of the war in his native Kosovo, which was converted into a museum of ethology during the reconstruction, which resulted in the loss of the museum‘s archive of the natural and animal world.