Petrit Halilaj

Animal motifs, particularly birds, are omnipresent in Petrit Halilaj’s work. After creating For the Birds, an installation he realised with Alvaro Urbano, Halilaj asked friends to record sounds as if they wanted to and were able to communicate with birds. These strange sounds can be heard in public places. They mirror the artist’s working environment; he shares his studio with canaries that he talks to, studies, and whose songs he imitates.

Petrit Halilaj learnt to draw as a teenager in a refugee camp during the war in Kosovo. His memories of a childhood spent in the countryside and his personal experience of war, destruction and displacement are the basis of his reflections about life and the human condition. Although he draws on concrete and material biographical elements, his work avoids pathos and is rooted in
research into trauma and the ways in which it can be represented in art. His combinations of earth and rubble, stuffed animals covered in mud, live chickens and delicate drawings evoke a private and utopian universe in which the human being is objectified as being just like any other animal in the zoo, the works show his attempts at understanding such notions as “home”, “nation” and “cultural identity”.

Performance Day is coproduced with the Playground festival, (STUK Kunstencentrum & M-Museum Leuven), with support from the Agency for Arts and Heritage of Flanders, as part of the project "Alfred Jarry Archipelago" initiated by La Ferme du Buisson Centre for Contemporary Art in Noisiel (France), Le Quartier Centre for Contemporary Art in Quimper (France) and Museo Marino Marini in Florence (Italy). The venture is part of Piano, the Franco-Italian art exchange platform, in collaboration with M-Museum and the STUK Kunstencentrum in the framework of Playground in Leuven (Belgium).