Artist Petrit Halilaj Is Bringing His Whimsical, Poetic Work to the Met’s Rooftop

In 2010, having graduated from Brera Academy and moved to Berlin, Halilaj participated within the Berlin Biennale. It was his debut present on the worldwide stage. When he realized that he’d be given a price range of about 30,000 euros for his Biennale contribution, he realized he may use a part of the cash to assist construct the home that his mother and father dreamed of getting in Pristina, to be able to give their youthful kids higher instructional alternatives. The piece he made for the Biennale was a life-size duplicate, a ghost picture of the framework of their long-lost home. It was exhibited with stay chickens roaming round and thru it, simply as that they had been again in Halilaj’s childhood residence, and it bore one in every of his lengthy poetic titles: The locations I’m in search of, my expensive, are utopian locations, they’re boring and I don’t know methods to make them actual. The precise Pristina home was ultimately completed by his mother and father. “My mother and father presently stay in it,” he says, “and my 4 siblings had been additionally there till they moved out.” Elena Filipovic, who curated a Halilaj present at Wiels Modern Artwork Middle in Brussels in 2013, describes his Berlin exhibition as “not artwork imitating life and even the inverse, however actual life made into an artwork kind.”

Chickens have performed a big half in Halilaj’s artwork and life. “I talked to chickens as a rooster, of their language, after I was a child,” he says. For a gaggle present in Istanbul in 2008, he lived with chickens in a home he had inbuilt a kids’s playground. (The piece is titled They’re Fortunate to be Bourgeois Hens.) And he started his ongoing drawing collection of Bourgeois Hens—pencil sketches of fowl with a regal method—in 2009. Halilaj’s mantra is coexistence. He wasn’t allowed to convey stay chickens to “Runik,” his present present on the Museo Tamayo in Mexico Metropolis, the place he has reinstalled his Berlin Biennale ghost home. As a substitute, he introduced 50 examples of the birds and creatures and costumes that he had remodeled the previous 13 years. “The costumes are alter egos that inform tales,” he explains. (He wears them and performs at openings—he’s been a white raven, a rooster, a raccoon, a moth, amongst different life varieties.) As a part of the present, he painted a large-scale rooster spreading its wings in flight on the physique of an Aeroméxico Boeing 737. The aircraft turned what he calls “a political flying rooster,” crossing borders all through the Americas with no visa.

In 2011, at Berghain, the famously louche techno membership in Berlin, the artist Álvaro Urbano danced as much as Halilaj and mentioned, “Are you the rooster man?” They met once more two months later. Quickly after that, they began dwelling collectively, together with 12 uncaged and free-flying canaries. In 2020 they married in a joyous celebration of their studio and residential. “It was essentially the most emotional and delightful day of my life,” Halilaj says.

9 months later, their joint set up “Neglect Me Not,” a spectacle of large cloth flowers suspended from a glass dome ceiling, opened on the Nationwide Library of Kosovo in Pristina. It was timed to coincide with the fifth annual Pristina Pleasure Week. All of the flowers had some connection to the artists’ lives, together with a precise duplicate of the lily that was of their engagement bouquet. Halilaj has been within the forefront of the homosexual rights motion, lobbying the prime minister of Kosovo for LGBTQIA+ rights, particularly the precise to marry, within the new civil code that’s being written. “This regulation is extraordinarily necessary to make sure that the entire society can have the identical rights,” Halilaj says, “and that there’s house for everybody to like and to stay.” Annually, Halilaj and Urbano journey to a rustic they’ve by no means been to earlier than. They spent Christmas this 12 months in Morocco, with three days within the desert and no telephones, after which, on the way in which residence, went to Madrid for New 12 months’s celebrations with Urbano’s massive Spanish household.