The Menagerie

A childhood in war-torn Kosovo led Petrit Halilaj to make some of the most exuberant, playful contemporary art around. Dodie Kazanjian meets the optimist as he prepares for a major installation at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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Through art, I’ve always been saving my life,” says Petrit Halilaj. “It was always a way out and a window to imagination and dreaming and telling stories.”

Born in 1986 in what was then Yugoslavia and is now Kosovo, Halilaj was 13 when his family home was burned to the ground by Serbian troops; he and his family—he has four younger siblings—were later placed in an Albanian refugee camp. It was here that a visiting Italian psychologist, Giacomo “Angelo” Poli, gave drawing paper and felt tip pens to a group of kids and told them to draw their fears and dreams. The 38 drawings that Halilaj did in response—half of them of birds in idyllic landscapes, the other half of burning houses, tanks, and Serbian soldiers with guns and bloody knives from the massacres he had witnessed—eventually fueled one of the most electrifying and humanistic careers in contemporary art.