The artist Petrit Halilaj still remembers leaving his house at age 12: It was during a brutal chapter of the Kosovo War in 1999, when his family made its way to a refugee camp in Albania after Serbian troops had set his village ablaze. A psychologist at the camp recommended that Halilaj pursue drawing as a creative outlet, and more than two decades later, that has spawned a celebrated international career in sculpture.
Recognizing Halilaj’s ability to weave personal narratives of freedom and displacement into his work, a jury of artists and curators have named him the 2027 Nasher Prize Laureate. The award comes with $100,000 and the opportunity to devise public programming with the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas. It follows a string of notable exhibitions for the artist, including last year’s rooftop commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a solo show at the Hamburger Bahnhof museum in Berlin that opened in September.
The prize is one of the most prestigious in contemporary art, and Halilaj said in an interview that he intended to donate the cash to his nonprofit, the Hajde! Foundation, which has been working to rebuild Kosovo’s House of Culture after it was destroyed during the war. “I am obsessed with reopening it, and this award will add a piece of guarantee,” said the artist, who predicted that the arts center would reopen within the next two years, almost three decades after its destruction.
Over the summer, a representative for the award informed Halilaj that he had won, just as the artist was in crisis. He had returned to Kosovo for a production of his opera “Syrigana,” with a score by Lugh O’Neill and Nina Guo. The opera, named for a town of ethnic Albanians and Serbians, tells the story of a Kosovan myth about Adam and Eve marrying in Syrigana after being cast out of the Garden of Eden. The opera was commissioned by the Kosovo Philharmonic.
Halilaj received an urgent call from a member of the production about eight days before opening night. “We just found out that all the props, and everything, were burned,” he recalled being told. On containers and the nearby road, someone had spray-painted the word “Kill.”
But Halilaj worked to ensure that the show went on.
He was happy to bring people together. “Sometimes cultural events are not the best news for people who want to stay in hate and conflict,” he said.
The Nasher Prize celebrates Halilaj’s efforts to continue making art despite opposition. “His work is particularly resonant today,” Carlos Basualdo, the director of the Nasher Sculpture Center, said in a statement. “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.”
Zachary Small is a Times reporter writing about the art world’s relationship to money, politics and technology.
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