Images From Boyhood in a War Zone
ST. IVES, England — When Petrit Halilaj was 13 and a refugee from the war in Kosovo, Italian psychologists arrived at his camp in Albania and gave him some felt-tip pens.
He was soon drawing bright, childish pictures. But their subjects were far from colorful: In one, he depicted tanks blowing up a family’s home; in another, a mass grave. Others showed soldiers standing over dead bodies.
The psychologists spent two weeks in the camp, in 1999, trying to help the children process the traumas they had experienced during the war, in which ethnic Albanian rebels fought against Serbian troops. For Mr. Halilaj, an ethnic Albanian, those traumas were many. Serbian forces burned down his home and captured his father. His family fled from place to place, until they ended up as refugees in Albania.
Now, more than 20 years later, Mr. Halilaj is a rising figure in Europe’s art world. In his latest exhibition, at Tate St. Ives, an outpost of the British museum group in Cornwall, England, he has returned to the shocking pictures he drew as a child who had seen too much. (The show, “Very Volcanic Over This Green Feather,” runs until January 16.)
Mr. Halilaj, 35, said he revisited the pictures last year and was surprised by what he had drawn. Among the violence, he said, “I saw all these birds — peacocks and doves — and they were as big as the soldiers, as happy and proud.” He added: “I’d taken the space to draw landscapes that made me feel good. It was like I was saying, ‘Yes, it was awful, but I can dream and love, too.’ ”
In the show, segments of Mr. Halilaj’s boyhood drawings have been reproduced at huge scale and hung from the gallery ceiling, so that when visitors enter, they are met with a fantasy landscape of exotic birds and palm trees. But when they reach the other side of the room and turn around, they find that the suspended forms have on the reverse more macabre doodles: soldiers, tanks, wailing figures, burning houses.
Mr. Halilaj said he hoped the exhibition would make people think about how politicians and the news media portrayed the conflict. Even today, he added, some Balkan lawmakers twist the reality of the war in Kosovo to bolster their nationalist agendas.
Christine Macel, the curator of the Pompidou Center in Paris who featured his work in the 2017 Venice Biennale, said Mr. Halilaj “was both original as a person and artist — very open, and creative, and resilient, and full of imagination.”
Erzen Shkololli, a former head of the National Gallery of Kosovo, who showed Mr. Halilaj’s work there during his tenure, said the artist always used the country’s history as a starting point in his work, “but his art is about so much more.”
In some works, Mr. Halilaj’s messages are clear. In 2011, he dug 66 tons of soil from his family’s land in Kosovo, then piled it into a booth at Art Basel, offering it for sale. Jennifer Chert, one of his gallerists, said that work “was obviously about attachment to soil, the idea of homeland, and exile, but there was also the more cynical side of, ‘What is the value of land?’ ”
Other pieces are more elusive. For another work, “Poisoned by Men in Need of Some Love,” Mr. Halilaj recreated displays of moths and butterflies that had once been on display at Kosovo’s Museum of Natural History, but were left to decay during the war.
Yet he said he didn’t want visitors at St. Ives to focus solely on the show’s dark side. They have to walk back to the start of the exhibition when they leave, Mr. Halilaj said, and if they happen to look back, they’ll again be met by the fantasy landscape of exotic birds and trees.
He recently staged a joint show there with Alvaro Urbano, his husband, in which the couple hung huge fabric flowers under the dome of Kosovo’s National Library during Pride Week. Kosovo is still a macho society, he said, yet no one had protested the celebration of gay love.
“Under the flowers, I felt home for the first time in my life,” Mr. Halilaj said.