Artist Petrit Halilaj stood in the middle of his unusual new art installation “Aptari” on one of the rooftops of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, an installation that would, in the eyes of art critics, cement his status as one of the great talents of his young generation. When Kosovar artist Petrit Halilaj received an invitation to show his largest project ever in the United States, he knew exactly where to go, as he decided to go straight back to school to create his new installation. For “Aptari,” his very clever and cheerful sculptural installation, Hallilaj, 38, traveled to primary schools throughout southeastern Europe, documenting the doodles left behind by generations of schoolchildren on classroom walls, blackboards, books, desks and school notebooks. These children’s drawings from their schools in the Balkans formed the templates for the lively, sometimes mysterious, bronze and steel sculptures that now adorn the New York skyline in the form of large art sculptures that take their place on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The title of the installation, “Aptari,” refers to the alphabet of the Albanian language, the letters of which Halilaj learned in his early childhood.
Halilaj was born in 1986 in the small Kosovar village of Kosturk. During his student days, the harshest fighting battles in southeastern Europe took place, and his family home was destroyed during the 1999 Kosovo War, which was one of the cruelest decade-long ethnic wars in the Balkans. Because of the war, the family fled to Albania, where the child, Halilaj, found encouragement to draw from psychiatrists in the refugee camp there. War correspondents at that time spoke of a child prodigy who drew the most accurate drawings with both hands.
Halilaj now lives in Berlin, but is still deeply involved in the life of the artistic movement within Kosovo, which gained independence in 2008 to become the newest country in Europe, and is one of the faces of an exciting and creative new generation of Kosovar artists whose interests revolve around issues of peace, family and childhood… based on To a dense register of symbols, especially birds, whose wings and claws appear in most of the ancient monuments of the Balkans, and to the new generation of Kosovar artists. (Image from the New York Times service)
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