Petrit Halilaj
Who does the earth belong to while painting the wind?!
ChertLüdde, Berlin
2 May – 25 July 2026

ChertLüdde is pleased to present Who does the earth belong to while painting the wind?!, an exhibition by Petrit Halilaj (1986, Kostërrc, Kosovo), resulting from over fifteen years of collaboration between the artist and the gallery, and unfolding in parallel with Halilaj’s largest institutional presentation in Germany, An Opera Out of Time, at the Hamburger Bahnhof.

At the heart of this exhibition, a container is deconstructed—an artistic gesture that opens the gallery to storytelling and gathering, while at the same time tracing a history deeply rooted in the artist’s origins.

As soon as visitors enter the gallery, they step into a space filled with traditional Kosovar qilim rugs, books, and defa (tambourines) arranged to form a comfortable environment for gathering, exchange, and gossip. The interior draws on the traditions of the Odë and the Çajtore in Kosovo—both key sites of social life. Odë (Albanian, from Ottoman Turkish Oda) refers to a guest or reception room historically used for the transmission of stories and political thought, only accessible to men. As such, it represents not only a physical space but also a structure of belonging shaped by both hospitality and exclusion. Çajtore, from çaj (tea), refers to a teahouse—a place to sit, drink, and talk. The space, marked by a spray-painted sign above the entrance that becomes legible as “Gaytore,” transforms the inherited social forms of Odë and Çajtore into an inclusive site for gathering through storytelling and music. In addition to serving tea, the space holds a library of historical and political writings, confronting the systemic oppression of people in the Balkan region with books on birds and poultry. This becomes the backdrop for hosting events that engage diverse voices in exploring the region’s complex histories.

A small drawing of an Odë made by the artist as a child inspired much of the interior of this space. Though damaged, the drawing carries its own history: it was preserved by the artist’s mother, who buried her most precious belongings before fleeing with her family to a refugee camp in Albania during the Kosovo War (1998–1999), when Slobodan Milošević’s Serbian-led Yugoslav army carried out a campaign of erasure and ethnic cleansing against the Albanian population of Kosovo. Bearing traces of its burial, the drawing speaks to how deeply it is rooted in the history of the land—a connection that extends to the other artworks on display.

Halilaj’s video Who does the earth belong to while painting the wind?! (2012) transports the visitors to the location where it was filmed. Set in Kostërrc, Kosovo, on a summer day, the work captures what Halilaj observed over a 24-hour period as he followed butterflies and other pollinators moving through the meadow. This thriving ecosystem holds particular significance, as it is the artist’s place of birth and the site where his family’s home once stood before it was burned down during the war. The video, showing a landscape in recovery, fills the exhibition with birdsong and the soft whirring of grass.

In the main gallery space, a shipping container has been cut into eleven large metal sections. Assembled into an elongated rectangle, its walls are flipped inside out to reveal the charred interior, inviting visitors to peer through small gaps to read the graffiti on the blue panels inside.

The container originally housed props for Halilaj’s opera Syrigana (2025), now a major installation in his solo exhibition An Opera Out of Time (on view at the Hamburger Bahnhof until the 31^st of May 2026) that adapts elements from Genesis. On the 20^th of June 2025, just a few days before the premiere of the open-air opera, two containers storing props for the second act were attacked by unknown perpetrators, who defaced them with hate speech and Serbian nationalist symbols before setting them ablaze. Much of the opera’s Garden of Eden scenography was destroyed by fire, from sculptural flowers and pear trees to ocarinas and props such as helicopters and qilim rugs.

This incident left many questions unresolved: why would anyone attempt to halt such an event, and how should a community respond to an act of violence like this? Rather than allowing the attack to define the moment, Halilaj—together with his studio, volunteers from the  community, and fellow artists—reconstructed what was destroyed in a remarkably short time, allowing Halilaj’s opera to proceed as originally conceived. The determination to produce the opera unchanged became a deliberate affirmation of the opera’s central message of unity. Refusing to let the hatred behind the attack overshadow its spirit, Syrigana debuted on the 29^th of June 2025, on the very hill after which it was named—a village where both Serbian and Albanian communities still live side by side.

Now relocated to the gallery, the vandalized container becomes both a site of reflection on the attack and a countergesture that constrains it, turning Halilaj’s scenographic landscape, now reduced to ash, back toward its viewers.

Playing with the etymology of the name Kosovo, Halilaj sets ash-covered blackbirds around the metal container. Derived from the Serbian Kosovo polje (“field of blackbirds”), the name refers to the bird (kos) and is tied to the site of the historic Battle of Kosovo in 1389¹, an event that became deeply embedded in Serbia’s collective memory and national consciousness.

Orbiting within the installation is a pear, referring to a different etymology. The pear symbolically embodies Kosovo’s ancient name Dardania, linked to the Albanian word dardhë (pear), meaning “land of pears.” The sculpture also appears in the “Paradise Lost” scene in Halilaj’s Syrigana, in which Adam and Eve fall in love beneath a pear tree. In this scene, Eve—represented as a rooster—eats the forbidden fruit, the pear, and invites Adam, a fox, to do the same. Immediately afterward, they are carried away to Syrigana by a KFOR helicopter.

Reimagined and recontextualized, Halilaj’s pear marks the point at which historical narrative, folklore, and popular belief converge. It oscillates between desire and morality, queering the story and reshaping its form. Holding these layered meanings, the pear rotates on its own, out of reach of visitors—almost like a distant planet charged with the gravity of desire, but coexisting with the blackbird sculptures.

Various sculptures made of synthetic hair and brass extend from the walls like branches. These uncanny tail-like sculptures allude to the racist caricatures aimed at instigating violence and discrimination against the Albanian-Kosovar population, based on Serbian Prime Minister Vladan Đorđević’s 1913 book The Albanians and the Great Powers. Depicting Albanians in dehumanizing terms by invoking labels such as “Arnauts”² and even claiming they retained tails well into the 19th century, the text is rife with derogatory assertions that fed a long history of violence, suppression, and attempts to erase Albanian identity. Halilaj’s sculptures respond to these grotesque claims by exaggerating them with pointed ridicule.

Together, the sculptural tails, the burnt container, the ashen blackbirds, and the pear converge into a single landscape, becoming the very place the artist depicted in another drawing from his childhood. Rendered in black ink, partially diffused into blue watermarks, the drawing shows hills, a house, trees, and birds in flight. Like the drawing of the Odë in the first room, much of its surface is blurred and yellowed by moisture from when it was buried—evidence of both its survival and the attempted erasure of the land it represents.

Unearthed by his mother upon their return after the Kosovo War, Halilaj—still a child then—began to rework the drawing’s faded surface, adding trees and a bird standing upright in the riverbed with a fish in its beak. Rising from the damaged sections of the image, the bird becomes a quiet but resolute reminder of resistance, refusing the attempted annihilation and asserting, instead, a persistent presence of life.

Download HERE the full Press Release with the Critical text  Ndoshta po vijnë / Bit će da stižu / Perhaps they are coming by Hana Ćurak.

Notes:

1. The Battle of Kosovo in 1389 was fought between an Ottoman army and a Balkan coalition led by Serbian and Bosnian forces, alongside other allies. Although the coalition suffered a military defeat, the battle came to be framed as a moral victory central to Serbian national identity, often overshadowing the contributions of other Balkan forces involved in the defense of the region.
2. “Arnaut” is an exonym for Albanians, originating from Turkish, which was used in the 19th-century and carries derogatory connotations.
   

Biography

Petrit Halilaj (1986, Kostërrc, Kosovo) lives in Berlin.

Petrit Halilaj understands exhibitions as a way to alter the course of personal and collective histories, creating complex worlds that claim space for freedom, desire, intimacy, and identity. His work is deeply connected to the recent history of his native country Kosovo and the consequences of cultural and political tensions in the region, which he often takes as a starting point for igniting countercurrent poetics for the future. Rooted in his biography, the projects encompass a variety of media, including sculpture, drawing, painting, text, and performance. Often incorporating materials from Kosovo and manifesting as ambitious spatial installations, his work transposes personal relationships, places, and people into sculptural forms. Halilaj’s practice can be seen as a playful and, at times, irreverent attempt to resist oppressive politics and social norms towards an untamed celebration of all forms of connectedness and freedom.

Currently, his work is on display at Petrit Halilaj: An Opera out of Time, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (11 September – 31 May 2026) and In Interludes and Transitions, Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale, JAX District (30 January – 2 May 2026).

Photo by Marjorie Brunet Plaza