Petrit Halilaj

Petrit Halilaj
Author: Petrit Halilaj
Publisher: Kunstraum Innsbruck, Chert
Language: English
Pages:
Size:
Weight: 150 g
Binding: Softcover
ISBN:
Availability: In stock
Price: €60.00
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Product Description

Petrit Halilaj

Published Kunstraum Innsbruck and Chert, on occasion of Petrit Halilaj’s solo exhibition at Kunstraum Innsbruck, Sept. 17 – Nov. 5, 2011

Edition of 700

Petrit Halilaj’s artistic oeuvre is rooted in the artist’s memories of his childhood in Kosovo, which he mentally arranges inside a utopian room. Halilaj builds an archaic world, whose whimsical and grotesque elements are owed rather to the progress of human civilisation than to tradition, e.g. when he presents a house made from plywood slabs, a chicken coop turned rocket, or several cubic metres of soil.

The archaic, as it were, intransigently protrudes into the world of the present, as a system with its own logic and its own laws. Which amounts neither to a form of nostalgia and romanticism nor does it constitute a document of migration. The result − objets trouvés and places displaced, metamorphosed − are not so much metaphorical moments, as with Joseph Beuys or Arte Povera, as signals from sub-conscious areas that take the form of an image or sculpture.

The whole project is an attempt to look back in time and re-discover the lost moments and broken situations hidden by our memory. In a very intimate sense, as is often the case with Halilaj’s approach, the exhibition is dedicated to the artist’s private sphere, his family in particular, with whom he shared his childhood, his first understanding of things, and also the tragic moments of the war in Kosovo. The exhibition aims to open up a possibility back in the past, to reflect more on the things left behind and go straight to our personal, private, intimate and embarrassing history. “I want to go back to the point, I want to go on.”