A giant spider currently looms over the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s rooftop, its face crumpled into a knowing smile. The arachnid would seem terrifying if it didn’t also play host to a friendly companion: a tiny bird who is perched atop one crooked leg, arms outstretched as though it were about to take flight.
Together, the two form quite the duo. But depending on where you stand, they may both melt away into the skyline behind them, rendering them just another bizarre footnote in the vast New York ecosystem. Amid a downpour, the grinning bird may not be visible at all.
Petrit Halilaj, a 38-year-old phenom from Kosovo, is the maker of these sculpted animals, which are part of his rooftop commission for the Met. The museum has now done nearly a dozen of these commissions like this one, each created by a different artist every summer. Most have been big, extravagant, and tacky. Halilaj’s, by contrast, is pared-down and minimal, and is the best of the bunch because of it.
The artist is no stranger to doing grand sculptures, having made a name for himself at the 2010 Berlin Biennale by showing a to-scale facsimile of the armature for his family’s Prishtina home. He’s even made another house-like structure for the Met’s roof, peopling it with a stick figure and a golden star. You can walk beneath the structure and peer up at a Picassoid eye that stares back down.
That’s the closest that Halilaj’s latest, an installation called Abetare (2024), gets to Instagram fodder. Setting aside the house and the spider, much of the steel components are spare, modestly scaled, and semi-abstract.
Many feature welded-together words that provide insight into Halilaj’s reference points. Some of the words are telling. The name of Runik, Halilaj’s hometown, appears in one work. The acronym KFOR, short for the Kosovo Force, shows up in another. These act as reminders that Abetare, which refers to books used to teach Kosovar children the alphabet, is embedded within Halilaj’s own experience as a Kosovar whose life was disrupted by the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s.
Petrit Halilaj, Abetare, 2024.
Courtesy the artist; ChertLüdde, Berlin; kurimanzutto, Mexico City and New York; Mennour, Paris/Photo Hyla Skopitz
Amid war in Kosovo, Halilaj was displaced to a refugee camp in Albania as a teenager. There, he was encouraged to draw by a group of Italian psychologists who had visited the site. For Halilaj, art became both a creative outlet and a means of self-preservation—drawing mountainous landscapes and soldiers holding guns was a way to process his tumultuous situation. He’s consistently returned to those sketches as an adult, at times enlarging them to form newly produced artworks.
But Halilaj’s drawings aren’t the only ones that feature in his beguiling sculptures, which have more recently tended to ones he found in schoolrooms in Kosovo. Here, he’s expanded his inquiry beyond his home country, focusing on other Balkan nations as well.
The spider, for instance, was sourced from a banged-up desk in Skopje, North Macedonia, where it was initially accompanied by references to Pokémon that do not appear here. Another sculpture now pairs a heart-shaped form now beside a phallus and the word “tiddies.” Rather than simply repeating the found imagery, however, he remixes them anew, implying a form of solidarity among teens—innocent and horny alike—separated by national borders.
By appropriating kids’ marks, Halilaj warmly suggests that these doodles are artistic endeavors worth noting. It’s not possible to retrieve any information about who these budding artists were, however—the names of these creators have been lost. Abetare is infused with the sense that nothing lasts forever, hence the frail look of these steel creations.
But despite their apparent fragility, these sculptures are sturdier than they may initially appear. Halilaj has said that he was required by the Met to have his piece be able to withstand a hurricane. In addition to simply fulfilling a contractual obligation, Halilaj has also rendered these children’s drawings monumental, ensuring that they persevere the test of time (and, apparently, climate change).
Petrit Halilaj, Abetare, 2024.
Courtesy the artist; ChertLüdde, Berlin; kurimanzutto, Mexico City and New York; Mennour, Paris/Photo Hyla Skopitz
Even if Abetare does contain a weighty commentary on the tenuousness of national histories, Halilaj has wisely offered moments of levity. Be sure to spot the cat person dangling from a flower-strewn pergola on your way out, and don’t forget the toothy kitty leaned against the area next to a bench.
Take a second, too, to muse before a louvered screen set within a low wall. Next to it, Halilaj has placed an evocative word: “HERE.” It could refer to a city (New York), a museum (the Met), or a particular part of an institution (its ventilation system). Technically, this “HERE” is from elsewhere (the Balkans), but it looks quite at home in its funky new locale.
