A solo exhibition from PETRIT HALILAJ. She, fully turning around, became terrestrial can be seen at Bundeskunsthalle.
Petrit Halilaj is an artist whose work is concerned with tracing history and biography. The artist quotes images from his personal recollections and draws on them in his work, translating them into the changed reality of the present day and, with it, into a new context and a new ‘guise’ – which often involves considerable magnification. Halilaj pursues this investigation of the past not just on his own behalf. In many of his installations he reviews and dramatises his own biography that has been profoundly marked by the Kosovo War (1998–1999), turning it into an universal example for the quest for identity, for keeping memory alive and for a closer examination of the idea of home – especially in the ever-recurring story of its loss.
To visualise this sustained engagement, the artist tends to use simple materials such as earth, straw, wood, concrete, stones or the rubble of his destroyed family home. But he also incorporates archival material he has managed to find, for example records from the destroyed Natural History Museum in Priština, Kosovo.
A cooperation between the Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany, Bonn, and the Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne. The Kunstverein is presenting a Petrit Halilaj exhibition from 17 April to 7 June 2015.
