Petrit Halilaj has been awarded the Nasher Prize 2027, an award dedicated exclusively to excellence in contemporary sculpture. The prize provides $100,000 and the opportunity to develop public programs with the Nasher Sculpture Center. The artist has decided to donate the entire amount to the Hajde! Foundation, a Kosovo-based nonprofit organization founded with his sister Hana that aims to create spaces and opportunities for the local art community.
Born in 1986 in Kostërrc, a small village near Runik (Kosovo), Halilaj is internationally known for his fantastical and immersive spaces, capable of interweaving the wonder of childhood with the personal and political memory of his homeland. Through different artistic languages - from sculpture to drawing, text to performance - the artist transforms symbols and signs of innocence into three-dimensional dreamscapes, where narrative, myth, fantasy and symbolism combine into collective experiences.
Halilaj’s childhood was marked by the Kosovo War in the late 1990s. In 1998, when he was just 13, his village was destroyed by Serb forces and his family home razed to the ground, forcing him to flee with his loved ones to a refugee camp in Albania. There he met Italian psychologist Giacomo Poli, who was organizing art workshops for refugee children in the camp. Poli encouraged him to translate memories and dreams into drawings, an exercise that enabled him to cope with the trauma and has remained a constant reference point in his artistic journey. At 18, Halilaj moved to Italy to study at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan, and in 2009 he settled in Berlin, where his career gained international momentum. Today he divides his life and work between Kosovo, Germany and Italy.
His artistic research continuously returns to crucial moments of childhood, transforming them into collective experiences that can speak of universal joy and pain. Often, fragments of his personal biography become an integral part of his works, in a continuous dialogue between private memory and universal dimension.
“In his installations and performances, where drawings acquire a sculptural presence and the space of imagination is literally freed, Petrit Halilaj reveals how experiences of pain are inextricably linked to moments of joy, tenderness and connection,” says director Carlos Basualdo, director of the Nasher Scupture Center. “Her work is particularly relevant today, both for its deep investment in the humanity of lived experience and for the way it creates spaces of encounter that transcend artistic, cultural and geographic boundaries. In choosing Halilaj, the Nasher Prize jury recognizes his work as formally innovative and deeply relevant to the present moment.”
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| Nasher Prize 2027, an award for excellence in contemporary sculpture, goes to Petrit Halilaj |
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