On this day in 2021, Kosovar diaspora member Petrit Halilaj opens his solo exhibit entitled “Very Volcanic Over This Green Feather” at one of the premiere artistic institutions of the world, the Tate. The body of the exhibit was culled from 38 drawings made in his childhood as an exercise under therapist supervision, undergone to contend with the traumas he experienced during the recent war in 1999. These images exhibited at the Tate St. Ives, products of the unlikely combination of conflict and a child’s imagination, brought to the global stage the story of Kosova and its all too recent suffering. 

Suspended from wires, Halilaj took various aspects of his drawings and magnified their scale, creating in the exhibition room an alternative and fragmentary landscape—the very uncanniness perhaps felt as a result of displacement. Juxtaposed are images of horror and images of fantasy, creating a watery, dreamy-like sphere where the observer can entire the imaginative mind of a child living through war, the mind that held in simultaneity the imminent fear and the unyielding hope for survival. By putting unexpected images into dialogue with one another, the artist hopes to free the individual and collective histories from static narratives.