Petrit Halilaj: fragments drawn from a traumatic childhood

When Petrit Halilaj received confirmation of his inclusion in the 2020 Belgrade Biennale, he was surprised to find a blank space next to his name where his place of birth should be. The artist is from Kosovo, a country recognised by half of the UN’s member states — but not by Serbia, from which it declared independence in 2008, after a long-running conflict that erupted into war in the late 1990s when Halilaj was in his early teens and which drove his family into a refugee camp for more than a year.

The omission shocked him, undermining at a stroke his belief that, as an established artist living and working between Germany, Italy and Kosovo, he was “over it”. Delving subsequently into the literature on trauma, he discovered that it is typical for 20 years to pass before a person can revisit nightmares. “You tell yourself the main thing is that you survived,” he says on the phone from Berlin.

Halilaj, now 35, pulled out of the biennale, but the effect of the letter was profound. Suddenly he found the courage to re-examine drawings he had made as a 13-year-old in the Kukës II refugee camp in Albania during the war. He had left the drawings with Giacomo Poli, an Italian psychologist and now a close friend, who had visited the camp in 1999 and encouraged the children to draw and talk about what they had seen. “Always as a kid I had been more comfortable to draw rather than to talk,” Halilaj says. “And, at 13, I was becoming even more introverted.”

The Belgrade moment coincided with an invitation to make an exhibition for Tate St Ives. Like earlier work, the show was to reference Halilaj’s home town, Runik, exploring the fact that it is built on neolithic ruins and investigating contemporary attitudes to that history. But by the time the ideas were nailed down, the pandemic had put paid to the travel and movement of artefacts that the exhibition required. A show based on the drawings Halilaj made in the refugee camp began to take shape as an alternative.

“Petrit said, ‘I’m not sure I am ready, but if I could be, the thing I would most like to do is revisit the drawings,’” recalls Tate St Ives director Anne Barlow. “Over time, that became more and more what he felt compelled to do.”

The result is Very volcanic over this green feather — the title alluding to the emotional turmoil concealed by the bright fairytale landscape the artist initially appears to offer us. The room-filling installation makes brilliant use of the extra space Tate St Ives acquired in a 2017 extension. And on the way there you have a chance to survey the newly rehung permanent collection, which cleverly places the story of St Ives and modernism in a thematic, more global context.

Inside the temporary exhibition space Halilaj invites us to explore a dense forest of fragments from his teenage drawings, blown up, printed on felt and suspended from the ceiling. Viewed from the entrance, it’s a lush and exotic landscape, alive with animals and birds — a dove, some parrots and a peacock. Follow the path through the middle of this fantasy, however, and turn back. As you retrace your steps, the darkness of war takes hold — on layer after layer of the fragments, houses burn, bombs explode, Serbian militiamen wield knives and guns and mass graves pile up. It’s not a purely eyewitness account, Halilaj explains: the drawings combine images from the media, his imaginings and what he actually saw.

There were mines, but we didn’t care. We were so happy to go back, to see that landscape without the fear of death

At the centre, slightly off to one side, Halilaj has included himself, a cut-out of a small boy that comes not from the 38 drawings he made with Angelo, but one he made to show the then UN secretary-general Kofi Annan, who had seen the young artist on television and asked to meet him when he visited the camp. The figure is double-sided, the only element of the installation that touches the ground and faces in both directions.

Halilaj and his family returned to Runik just days after Nato peacekeepers arrived in Kosovo in June 1999, Nato’s air campaign having forced Serbia to accept a peace agreement. Their house had been destroyed, so they camped in a tent in the garden. “There were mines, but we didn’t care,” he says. “We were so happy to go back, to see that landscape without the fear of death.” 

The body of work he has built up since he went to Italy in 2004 to study at Brera Academy of Fine Arts, Milan, has been rooted in his biography, with Runik and his lost family home playing important roles. For the sixth Berlin Biennale in 2010, he recreated the skeleton of the house, with live chickens scratching around, the absence of walls highlighting the impossibility of feeling safe there.

Memories of his childhood and his experience of exodus and displacement re-emerged in 2013, when he represented Kosovo in the Venice Biennale. Subsequent installations have drawn on graffiti on the desks in his school, which was about to be demolished, and a play he mounted in the ruins of Runik’s cultural centre, the latter winning him the Mario Merz prize in 2017.

Birds, particularly migratory birds — which cover huge distances, knowing where to pause and how to come back — fascinate the artist. They occur throughout his work, as a metaphor either for people on the move or for the imagination. At times, he says, he has dressed as a bird to avoid having to talk about his work. “Birds have come in different shapes, and somehow I feel they always came to save me!”

At St Ives, Halilaj pursues his desire to understand both the world and his own identity without the straitjackets of nationality and nationalism. “This is so much my drive for what I do,” he says. But he hopes the exhibition goes beyond his own story.

The fragments at Tate are not just about loss, memory and the past: they are about the choices we make as we construct the future. “We are always able to deny the parts of a story we don’t want to see,” he says. Yet he is eager to play a part in the reconstruction of Kosovo and was recently in the capital, Pristina, helping to campaign for a section on LGBT+ rights to be included in the new constitution. His optimism is palpable. “I have no intention of giving up the dream of a better future.” 

To January 16 2022, tate.org