About Petrit Halilaj
Petrit Halilaj (b. 1986, Kostërrc, Kosovo) develops bodies of work that explore how life is sustained through relationships—between people, other species, architecture, memory, and place. Working across sculpture, drawing, installation, text, and performance, he approaches exhibitions as living environments where forms of affection, imagination, and coexistence can emerge. He treats personal histories as dynamic ecologies that continually transform through encounters, acts of care, and collective imagination. Birds, flowers, schools, houses, gardens, and communities appear throughout his work as active participants in worlds where boundaries between human and non-human, private and public, memory and possibility remain porous.
Halilaj’s practice speculates on broad themes like belonging, migration, hospitality, learning, and the ways living beings construct shared futures. His installations invite viewers into spaces where tenderness becomes a form of knowledge and imagination itself becomes a means of inhabiting the world differently.
Halilaj held solo exhibitions at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Institut Giacometti, Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City; Tate St. Ives, UK; Palacio de Cristal, Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid; New Museum, New York; Fondazione Merz, Turin; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan; Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne; Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn; Kunsthalle Sankt Gallen, among others. His work will be featured in Counterpublic Triennial, St. Louis (Sept - Dec 2026) Halilaj studied at the Brera Academy of Fine Art in Milan. He received the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (SARF) in 2018 and completed the MAK-Schindler Scholarship Program at the Mackey Apartments, Los Angeles (2016), as well as residency at Villa Romana, Florence (2013). In 2013, Halilaj represented Kosovo for the country’s first appearance at the Venice Biennale. In 2017, he was invited to participate in the 57th Venice Biennale by the curator Christine Macel, where he was awarded Special Mention by the Jury. From 2019 to 2025 he has been a professor at the Ecole National Supérieure des Beaux Arts de Paris, France, together with his partner and frequent artistic collaborator, Álvaro Urbano. He lives and works between Germany, Kosovo, and Italy.
About the Nasher Prize
The Nasher Sculpture Center has awarded the Nasher Prize to Otobong Nkanga (2025), Senga Nengudi (2023), Nairy Baghramian (2022), Michael Rakowitz (2020-21), Isa Genzken (2019), Theaster Gates (2018), Pierre Huyghe (2017) and Doris Salcedo (2016). The jury for the 9th Nasher Prize that selected Petrit Halilaj was comprised of Nairy Baghramian, artist; Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Director Emeritus of Castello di Rivoli, Italy; Lynne Cooke, Senior Curator, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Briony Fer, Professor, History of Art, University College London; Hou Hanru, Independent art historian, curator, and former Artistic Director, MAXXI, Rome; Yuko Hasegawa, Professor in Curatorial Theory and Practice at Graduate School of Management, Kyoto University, and Program Director of Art and Design at the International House of Japan; Pablo León de la Barra, Curator at Large, Latin America, Guggenheim Museum; and Sir Nicholas Serota, Chair, Arts Council England.