On this day in 2013, Kosovo made its debut at the Venice Biennale with artist Petrit Halilaj. 

Halilaj’s work, which explores themes of identity, displacement, and memory, was exhibited in the country’s pavilion and was met with critical acclaim.

Halilaj, born in 1986, spent his formative years in the midst of the Kosovo War. In 1999, he and his family fled to Albania as refugees, where he studied at the Academy of Arts in Tirana. He later continued his studies in Frankfurt, Germany, and is now based in Berlin.

Halilaj’s work often draws from his personal experiences of displacement and the trauma of war. He frequently uses found materials, such as twigs, feathers, and animal bones, to create intricate sculptures and installations that reference both his own history and the broader cultural and political context of Kosovo.

At the Venice Biennale, Halilaj’s exhibition, “I´m hungry to keep you close. I want to find the words to resist but in the end there is a locked sphere. The funny thing is that you´re not here, nothing is.,” featured a a strange structure built, or rather woven, of branches, twigs and rods gathered in Kosovo, its ground and walls covered with soil and mud.

Halilaj’s work has been exhibited in numerous international venues, including the New Museum in New York, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and the Palazzo Grassi in Venice. He has been the recipient of several awards, including the Mario Merz Prize in 2017 and the Edvard Munch Art Award in 2019.

Through his deeply personal and evocative work, Halilaj has emerged as one of Kosovo’s most prominent contemporary artists. His contributions to the Venice Biennale in 2013 helped to put Kosovo’s artistic scene on the global stage and marked an important moment in the country’s cultural history.