Kosovo-born artist Petrit Halilaj (b.1986) this week unveiled an exhibition on a very special canvas – the rooftop at New York’s iconic Metropolitan Museum of Art.
This latest iteration of his extensive “Abetare” project, first shown in 2015, is based on extensive research, comprising around 3,000 doodles he found on classroom desks both at his former school in Kosovo and in other countries in the Balkans.
For his first major outdoor installation, Halilaj has created a collection of sculptures – 3-D renderings of the doodles – atop the Met.
Although playful – his steel and bronze works include a spider, flower and stars, for example – the sculptures are a poignant illustration of collective memory and a look inside the minds and imaginations of schoolchildren growing up during or in the wake of division and brutal conflict in the region.
“The casual scribbles of schoolchildren done on their desks in moments of boredom or distraction reveal the fantasies and dreams of their minds,” the artist explains.
The title of the exhibition itself, taken from a book children in Kosovo use to learn the alphabet at school, is a nod to the education denied to thousands of children during the conflicts of the 1990s.
For Halilaj, who was forced as a young child to relocate to an Albanian refugee camp and for whom art became an outlet and form of therapy, the project is a deeply personal one.
