“His work is particularly resonant today both for its deep investment in the humanity of lived experience, and for the way it creates spaces of encounter that transcend artistic, cultural, and geographic boundaries. By choosing Halilaj, the Nasher Prize jury recognizes his work as both formally innovative and deeply relevant for the current moment."
Born in 1986 in Kostërrc, a small village outside the town of Runik, Petrit Halilaj is known for creating fantastical and immersive spaces that fuse childhood wonder with the personal and political history of his homeland. Using a variety of artistic languages—sculpture, drawing, text, and performance—Halilaj transforms the signs and symbols of innocence into three-dimensional dreamscapes and multi-layered installations that incorporate narrative and mythic performances and harness symbolism and fantasy as a force for hope and healing.
In the late 1990’s, Halilaj’s childhood was shattered by the outbreak of the Kosovo War, transforming his formerly peaceful, pastoral environment into one of fear, violence, and displacement. In 1998, at just 13 years of age, Halilaj’s village was destroyed by Serbian forces, and his home was burned to the ground, forcing his family to flee to a refugee camp in Albania. In the depths of crisis, Halilaj encountered Italian psychologist Giacomo Poli, who was leading an art workshop for child refugees in the camp. Poli encouraged him to draw his memories and dreams as a way to process the trauma he endured—a lesson he has held close throughout his career. At the age of 18 he moved to Italy and studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan, moving to Berlin in 2009 where his notoriety as an innovative artist quickly grew. Today Halilaj lives and works between Kosovo, Germany, and Italy.
In stunning ways, Halilaj’s art consistently revisits the formative childhood moments from the perspective of his own biography to represent a collective memory and unearth universal notions of joy and sorrow within his own experiences. Often his past enters his work directly, as in The places I’m looking for, my dear, are utopian places, they are boring and I don’t know how to make them real, where he applied funds from his 2010 Berlin Biennale commission to build a new home for his parents in Pristina, Kosovo, reassembling the wooden slats used to cast its concrete frame as a sculptural “skeleton” inside Berlin’s KW Institute for Contemporary Art. Live chickens wandered freely among viewers, introducing an avian leitmotif present throughout his career. For his 2021 exhibition at Tate St. Ives, titled Very Volcanic Over This Green Feather, Petrit exhibited over 80 felt-made suspended elements, each enlarged and remixed replicas from 38 drawings he originally made with Poli in the camp in 1999. Colorful depictions of animals and trees overlapped amid scenes of war and destruction, resulting in a traversable maze of real and imagined terror and fanciful escape. In 2023, for a mid-career presentation at the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City, Halilaj installed a large-scale drawing on a 747 Boeing aircraft from the Aeromexico fleet, effectively making a flying sculpture that crossed borders across the Americas for the duration of the exhibition and alluding to the impossibility of free travel for Kosovar citizens.
Halilaj’s ability to transform drawing into sculpture is among his most remarkable achievements. For The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2024 Roof Garden Commission titled Abetare, the artist revisited a 2015 project of the same name, recording thousands of drawings from children’s school desks, spanning generations of graffiti from schools—initially from Kosovo, then from throughout the Balkans—for the Met commission where he transformed them into stainless and bronze sculptures. In these works, Halilaj invokes the imaginative reach of childhood vision and memory, ranging from the frightening to the comforting, magnifying school day doodles into markers of history, culture, and universality.
Just as Halilaj’s personal memories persist in his work, so does the presence of Runik and Kosovar history and culture. For his Shkrepëtima project in 2018, Halilaj focused on his hometown, in particular the Runik’s former House of Culture, which was a longtime symbol of memory and learning in the region before it was partially destroyed during the Kosovo War, then left abandoned. With the help of community members, Halilaj cleaned up the space and renovated it to make it suitable for a theatrical performance he organized, finally re-purposing the project’s materials in the exhibition space of the Fondazione Merz in Turin, creating a stage-like experience using the sets, costumes and props of the performance. Halilaj repeats this dialogue between installation and performance again in his 2025 opera Syrigana. The five-act opera reinterprets a Kosovar legend where Adam and Eve come to the Kosovar village of Syrigana to marry after they are expelled from Eden. The performance, which was performed in Syrigana, Kosovo in collaboration with the Kosovo Philharmonic, forms the center piece for an exhibition at Hamburger Bahnhof, An Opera Out of Time, open September 2025 – May 2026.
The 2018 exhibition Ru at the New Museum in New York directly referenced the material heritage of Runik as one of the earliest Neolithic settlements in the region, recreating over 500 recorded objects and fragments from Kosovo’s Neolithic period, transforming them into birds nestled within a giant nest or grouped as standing flocks representing their migratory nature. The exhibition exemplifies Halilaj’s desire to blur history and imagination but also his continued incorporation of birds and nests as symbols of safety, freedom, and migration.
In his 2020 exhibition at the Palacio de Cristal, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, he referenced the courtship rituals specific to bowerbirds, which decorate their nests with colorful objects to attract a mate. Titled To a raven and hurricanes from unknown places that bring back smells of humans in love, Halilaj transformed the glass-clad space into an aviary of sorts, inviting birds through open windows and feeding stations to fly amongst a large brass and bronze sculpture of a bird’s foot, an anthropomorphic white raven figure, and giant painted canvas flowers made in collaboration with his partner and long-time collaborator, artist Álvaro Urbano. The exhibition served as a metaphorical act of union for the artists, who were married that same year, but also as a wider celebration of diversity and acceptance.
Halilaj’s ability to transform otherwise weighty subject matter and a traumatic personal history into poetic, whimsical, and beautiful works of art is a testament to the artist’s evocative merging of history and fact with imagination and memory. As Nasher Prize Juror, Pablo León de la Barra noted, “Through his work, and through giving shape to the traumas of childhood, of war, of displacement, he brings back the joy of reconstruction […] and the possibilities that art offers us to rebuild ourselves and our relationships within a broken society.”
About Petrit Halilaj
Petrit Halilaj (b. 1986 in Kostërrc, Kosovo) understands exhibitions as a way to alter the course of personal and collective histories, creating complex worlds that claim space for freedom, desire, intimacy, and identity. His work is deeply connected to the recent history of his native country Kosovo and the consequences of cultural and political tensions in the region, which he often takes as a starting point for igniting countercurrent poetics for the future. Rooted in his biography, the projects encompass a variety of media, including sculpture, drawing, text, and performance. Often incorporating materials from Kosovo and manifesting as ambitious spatial installations, his work transposes personal relationships, places, and people into sculptural forms. Halilaj's practice can be seen as a playful and, at times, irreverent attempt to resist oppressive politics and social norms towards an untamed celebration of all forms of connectedness and freedom.
Halilaj held solo exhibitions at 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 current solo exhibition (Sept 2025–May 2026) will be at the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum for Contemporary Art, Berlin.
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). He is currently 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.