The Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas has awarded its 2027 Nash Award to Petrit Halilaj, an artist in the spotlight who is the youngest artist to win the award since its inception in 2015.
The award has been awarded once a year since 2023 and has offered $100,000 in exhibitions and programs in Nasher. More details of Halilaj’s showcase in Nasher in 2027 will be announced later.
Halilaj’s unusual move decided to donate the $100,000 wallet to Hajde! The Foundation is a Kosovo-based nonprofit organization that he co-founded in 2014 with his sister, focusing on supporting the works of Kosovo artists.
“I am very humbled by the recognition and generous gift of the Nasher Award and I am honored to dedicate it all to Hajde! Foundation,” Halilaj said in a statement. “While my practice is constantly being influenced by the personal history rooted in Kosovo, Hajde’s mission is to create possibilities for art that may resonate locally and beyond. This gift will help ensure that the space for imagination, creation and dreaming goes beyond a person’s own position.”
Born in Kosovo in 1986, Halilaj is now located between Kosovo, Germany and Italy, and is known for his sculptures and installations that involve Kosovo’s historical and current socio-political realities, often filtered through a naive idea. The outbreak of Kosovo war in his youth in the late 1990s, including the destruction of his village by Serbian troops and his subsequent relocation to refugee camps in Albania, was a pure potential for work.
Halilaj is one of the most eye-catching sculptors today, and has been included in large exhibitions such as the Sydney Biennale 2024, the Lyon Biennale 2019, the Berlin Biennale 2010 and the Venice Biennale 2017, for which he received a special mention from the Golden Lion jury at the exhibition. He also represented Kosovo at the 2013 Venice Biennale.
Last year, he participated in the Rooftop Committee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and his work is currently the subject of a solo exhibition at Bahnhof, Hamburger. The Museo Tamayo in Mexico City conducted the most comprehensive survey of his work in 2023, with him in 2021 at Tate St. Ives, 2020 at Tate St. Ives, and Tate St. Ives in 2020.
Halilaj was selected by an eight-person jury composed of artist Nairy Bagramian, who won the Nash Award in 2022; Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, honorary director of Castello di Rivoli in Turin, Italy; Lynne Cooke, senior curator of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Briony Fer, art historian at University College London; Houlu, independent curator; Yuca Hadgchuan, professor of curator theory and practice at Kyoto University; Pablo Leónde la Barra, a large Latin American curator of Latin America in the Guggenheim Museum; Nicholas Serota, chairman of the Arts Council of England.
In a statement, Carlos Basualdo became the director of Nasher in the past May, saying: “In his installation and performance, the space where the drawings acquire the carved existence and imagination is actually freed, petrit halilaj reveals the painful experience, revealing his work and both human work and in the work of people, especially in experience, and is the established human being. It creates spaces for encounters that transcend artistic, cultural and geographical boundaries.
