“The Met’s highly anticipated 2024 Roof Garden Commission, by Kosovar artist Petrit Halilaj (born 1986, Kostërc, former Yugoslavia), is now on view through October 27, 2024. For his first major outdoor installation, Halilaj has transformed the Museum’s Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden with a sprawling work that explores the intersection of reality and fantasy through the rich world of children’s drawings. The installation’s metal sculptures are inspired by children’s doodles, drawings, and scribblings found on desks at the school he attended in Runik, Kosovo, as well as schools in Albania and countries from the former Yugoslavia, which are now undergoing significant cultural and sociopolitical change. The Roof Garden Commission: Petrit Halilaj, Abetare is the 11th in the series of site-specific commissions for the outdoor space.” — The Metropolitan Museum of Art

“The casual scribbles of schoolchildren done on their desks in moments of boredom or distraction reveal the fantasies and dreams of their minds,” said Halilaj. “I started to explore this in my practice in 2015, and it was important for me then to extend the dreams of my school in Kosovo to Europe, a part of the world from which my country was still isolated. Now, in 2024, numerous desks and scribbles from schools across the Balkans are showcased in a new context and on a new continent. My work here at The Met is dedicated to all the children whose lives have been interrupted and deeply scarred by wars around the globe. I hope their dreams will fly us to a better future.”

Petrit Halilaj (born Kosovo, 1986). Installation views of The Roof Garden Commission: Petrit Halilaj, Abetare, 2024. Courtesy of the artist; Chert Lüdde, Berlin; kurimanzutto, Mexico City / New York; Mennour, Paris. Image credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Photos by Hyla Skopitz. 

 “The Met is thrilled to unveil Petrit Halilaj’s intervention for the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden and share the deeply meaningful conversation it invites between the artist’s work, the Museum, the Manhattan skyline, and beyond,” said Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer. “Petrit Halilaj’s inspiring and multilayered work—which is both deeply rooted in the artist’s history and homeland and forward thinking and international in scope—powerfully reframes the complex role of the childhood imagination in history’s retelling of events.”

The Roof Garden Commission: Petrit Halilaj, Abetare is conceived by the artist in consultation with Iria Candela, The Met’s Estrellita B. Brodsky Curator of Latin American Art in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art.

Images courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art.