PETRIR HALILAJ
Petrit Halilaj is a Berlin-based artist, born in Kosovo in 1986. His work investigates identity, the blurring of personal and collective memory and the construction – and deconstruction – of narrative through a variety of forms and media, including text, drawings, sculpture, video, fabrics and artefacts. Recent exhibitions have included ABETARE (Fluturat), in 2017, for which Halilaj recreated a classroom by placing 11 desks from his primary school in Runik, Kosovo, in Galerie Kamel Mennour in Paris, and Shkrepëtima (2018), exhibited at Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern, Switzerland, and Fondazione Merz in Turin, Italy, which involved a series of artistic responses to material ruins discovered in his hometown that formed “an archaeology of the personal”. His latest exhibition, Very volcanic over this green feather, opened in October at Tate St Ives and revisits 38 drawings made by Halilaj at Kukës II refugee camp in Albania during the Kosovo War under the guidance of Italian psychologist Giacomo “Angelo” Poli. Halilaj spoke to TANK about transforming his drawings from paper to sculpture, legacies of trauma and his meeting with former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan.
Interview by Matthew JanneyPortrait by Angela B. Suárez
Matthew Janney Your exhibition Very volcanic over this green feather takes motifs, images and elements from 38 drawings you created while in a refugee camp in Albania in 1998–1999 and transforms them into an immersive, sculptural environment of hanging images that explores collective memory. What were you trying to communicate by lifting these images off the paper?
Petrit Halilaj I’ve just come from the first day of the opening – which was also the first day I could finally see the result – and when you see the first landscape, when you enter, you see this forest of personal and fragments that appear turned or abstract, somehow. In a way it’s dominated by the absence of people and by the presence of animals and landscapes, so I couldn’t wait to see how much it changed with people starting to kind of swim in it and find their way. The thing that I most loved is to see how these hills, these ponds or trees and bushes or grasses felt finally completed by the people. There was this overlapping of different things. I left with a huge amount of joy at seeing the work finally completed.
MJ I love the idea that the people complete the art.
PH That’s the joy, really, because the whole aim was finally to be able to share the work with the public. But here their presence was so important to animate the art – these fragments are only part of a story.
MJ It is said that trauma arises from an inability to redescribe. By lifting these images from your drawings and reframing them in a new visual language, you’re offering a redescription of your past.
PH Absolutely. The exhibition opens these images to infinite narrative possibilities. When you go through it, you make connections. Recomposing the fragments of the original drawings from 1999 – where the soldiers were imposing the narrative – gave me a stronger sense of control over these experiences. But the exhibition creates a space for alternative narratives; to reimagine a different story and possibly make it more bearable. It was a temptation to reflect on how we remember things. As a teenager, when I drew peacocks and these incredibly colourful and happy landscapes, they were not representing what I was feeling, but what I was dreaming of – it definitely did not reflect where I was emotionally. These experiences of the war affected my life so much, I felt as an artist I should have waited until I had the conditions and the artistic ideas to translate it – it was just too heavy for me to go back before, and this is the reason why this project is the first one in which I approach the Kosovo War directly.
MJ Tell me about your relationship with Giacomo Poli. I understand that in order to create this exhibition, you reconnected. So the psychological work became as integral to the curation as the art.
PH It’s crazy because when I first met Angelo, he was a total stranger, like many other volunteers who were helping us, bringing us food or medical supplies. Angelo was there for two weeks and introduced a drawing programme. And after 15 days, he finished his mission and went back to Italy. But during these two weeks, I did these 38 drawings – I always felt so comfortable drawing. So we really connected without being able to communicate in a common language. I remember he asked once, how would you resolve the war? And of course, I didn’t draw NATO aeroplanes or anything like that; I just wanted peace. My mother told me that when he left, I didn’t eat for two days. I was so sad – at the time my father was a prisoner of war, so clearly, Angelo not only completed that father figure for me that I was missing, but also he gave me space to tell stories. I remained in the Kukës II camp and one other camp in Albania until Miloševic´ lost the war and his army had to leave Kosovo. Later, of course, I went back to Angelo and I started to share memories and feelings with him and told him I was ready now to understand more. He told me when you want to go back to something that is unresolved, it’s important to isolate it in time and in space and also check what traces still exist. It was a very practical approach. The whole idea of the exhibition came by analysing the pictures one by one then dividing and grouping them. And I started to wonder what it would be like to keep certain elements and ignore others. Angelo and I, together with my studio, started a process of cutting and experimenting and just accidentally these shapes were flipping and shifting into new forms and you could see this dialogue between what you see and what you don’t see, between good and bad and between abstraction and figuration. I was impressed that this was how I had conceived of these images in my mind. The more you try to see a complete picture the more it’s bombed by flashes of visions – you can’t just fix it still. You just can’t get it; even if you have the best analysis in the world, it fails to stick. I became more and more fascinated by how to transform these images into something that could live sculpturally.
MJ Memory is, of course, subject to distortions and omissions and inventions; it changes over time. How have these images changed for you and were there any images or objects that you added that weren’t in the initial set of drawings?
PH We’ve been working on this project for two years. We experimented with collage and cutting them in a way where they would look different when flipped. So you have the image and then on the other side, you would not recognise what it is because it would become completely abstract. We experimented with form – and found a scanner studio in Leipzig; I think it’s the biggest scanner in Germany – and we spent a year printing on everything you can imagine. We were not completely satisfied with our results, so we also tried wood and metal. I wanted to find a balance between keeping the quality of the page and its flatness, but also make it sculptural. I wanted to find this in-between of all of them, between sculpture, drawing, painting, also reproduction of image. I finally settled on felt; it fulfilled all these requests. We found this crazy guy who had a six-metre inkjet printer, so the printing has a depth. And then we spraypainted the backs of images. I wanted to explore this idea that memory accompanies us, that even if we are somewhere, there is always something else missing, something that is still present in our mind, even in a blurred form.
MJ The exhibition presents news articles, photographs and media footage of your meeting with former Secretary-General of the United Nations Kofi Annan during his visit to Kukës in 1999. And in the centre of the installation is the figure of a boy, an image taken from a drawing you prepared for Kofi Annan, standing alone after a massacre.
PH After Angelo left, it was said that Kofi Annan would come and so I prepared this drawing. As a 13-year-old boy, I had this idea that my drawings could convince him to accelerate the stopping of the war or just stop the war altogether. When you’re a kid, that’s how you think. But then I didn’t give it to him because my grandfather called all that action theatrical; he said Kofi Annan should have stopped the war already. Nevertheless, when Kofi Annan came he wanted to meet me because he had seen me in the news because of my drawings. I was like, “This is insane!” At the same time, I trusted my grandfather, so when Kofi Annan asked me, “Do you want to give it to me so we can hang it in the United Nations building and all the world will see what you witnessed in Kosovo?”, I said I’d prefer to keep it. So I didn’t give it to him.. I was thinking back to all these stories and how I wanted to put them together in one exhibition because even to me, they don’t seem real. All these experiences changed my perception about life and the world and the importance of drawing, and I wanted to do something new with those memories. This one element of the boy is the only element that they printed on both sides and is the only element in the exhibition that touches the floor; everything else is suspended.
MJ It’s the central image?
PH The boy in the middle is not the central image, but in a way he has a central role. It seems that the world is going around him because I totally stand by the idea that we are part of bigger realities, even the war is so much bigger than what a person can do or remember. I wanted to place this boy somewhere that is in relation to two things, but not in the centre. You make it clear, as I said before, that the people are actually completing the work, not the other elements in the exhibition. When memories emerge from the past they do so in fragments, and our imagination of the future operates in a similar way. If our dream of the future also has a fragmentary nature, then this exhibition can be seen as a small star in a constellation that forms the collective imagination about the world to come – a world that is able to look at the future with radical hope, but also with deep roots in its history. ◉