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Petrit Halilaj, Si Okarina e Runikut, 2014 (detail). Installation view: “Yes but the sea is attached to the Earth and it never floats around in space. The stars would turn off and what about my planet?,” kamel mennour, Paris. © Petrit Halilaj. Courtesy the artist; kamel mennour, Paris/London; and ChertLüdde, Berlin. Photo: Fabrice Seixas and archives kamel mennour”
Exhibition
Petrit Halilaj: RU
27 Sep 2017 – 7 Jan 2018
Regular hours
- Wednesday
- 11:00 – 18:00
- Thursday
- 11:00 – 21:00
- Friday
- 11:00 – 18:00
- Saturday
- 11:00 – 18:00
- Sunday
- 11:00 – 18:00
- Tuesday
- 11:00 – 18:00
Address
- 235 Bowery
- New York
New York - NY 10002
- United States
Travel Information
- From the East Side of Manhattan Take the downtown 6 train to Spring Street. Exit the station and walk one block north on Lafayette Street to Prince Street. Turn right and proceed until Prince Street ends four blocks later at Bowery. From the West Side of Manhattan Take the downtown N or R train to Prince Street. Exit the station and proceed east on Prince Street for six blocks to Bowery. You may also take the downtown D or F train to Broadway/ Lafayette. Walk three blocks east to Bowery and turn right two blocks to Prince Street. From Brooklyn Take the Manhattan-bound F train to 2nd Avenue. Exit at Houston Street and walk one block west to Bowery. Turn left, and proceed two blocks south to Prince Street. From Queens Take the Manhattan-bound F train to 2nd Avenue. Exit at Houston Street and walk one block west to Bowery. Turn left, and proceed two blocks south to Prince Street.
In his work, Petrit Halilaj often departs from his own biography and makes use of exhibition processes to alter the course of private and collective histories.
About
Encompassing sculpture, drawing, text, and video, many of Halilaj’s works incorporate materials from his native Kosovo and manifest as ambitious spatial installations through which the artist translates personal relationships into sculptural forms. His contribution to the 6th Berlin Biennial (2010) featured a life-size supporting structure for his family’s new home; the work comprised both the construction of this home in Pristina as well as its ghost shell on view in Berlin. In another project from 2013, Halilaj uncovered and recreated the deteriorated collection of the natural history museum in Kosovo, which had been discarded after the end of the Kosovo War in the 1990s.
For his New Museum exhibition, Halilaj will present an ambitious new project that begins in Runik, the city in which he was born and the site of one of the earliest Neolithic settlements in the region, where some of Kosovo’s most significant artifacts have been found—among them a small musical instrument known as the Runik Ocarina. The Ocarina, part of a collection of objects held by the Serbian government since the war, represents a heritage inaccessible to citizens of Kosovo. Through his work, Halilaj will trace residents’ recollections of remaining archaeological objects as personal origin stories and, by recreating their annexed collection, will give shape to a material heritage that currently exists only in their imagination.
The exhibition is curated by Helga Christoffersen, Assistant Curator.