DALLAS, TX.- The Nasher Sculpture Center announces Kosovar artist Petrit Halilaj as the 2027 Nasher Prize Laureate, becoming the ninth and youngest artist to receive the award. The Nasher Prize has emerged as one of the most significant honors in contemporary sculpture, celebrating artists whose work has expanded and reshaped the possibilities of the medium. Over the past decade, its laureates have continually pushed the boundaries of material and form investigating what sculpture can be and how it can address contemporary life. Halilaj, who lives and works between Kosovo, Germany, and Italy, joins this distinguished lineage with a practice that poignantly explores identity, history, and belonging through sculpture’s evolving language. With his selection, the Nasher Prize reaffirms its role as a global touchstone for the present and the future of the field.

In accordance with the artist’s wishes, the $100,000 prize will be donated to Hajde! Foundation, the Kosovo-based nonprofit Halilaj and his sister, curator Hana Halilaj, founded in 2014 to create spaces and opportunities for Kosovar artists. One of its most ambitious projects is the revitalization of the House of Culture in Runik, Kosovo, a former community arts center in the town where Halilaj spent much of his childhood, which was profoundly affected by war.

“I am deeply humbled by the recognition and generous gift of the Nasher Prize, which I am proud to dedicate in its entirety to Hajde! Foundation,” says Halilaj. “While my practice is continually shaped by my personal history rooted in Kosovo, the mission of Hajde! is to create possibilities for art to resonate both locally and beyond. This gift will help ensure that spaces for imagining, creating, and dreaming beyond the limits of one’s own place can flourish.”

Born in 1986 in Kostërrc, a small village outside the town of Runik, Petrit Halilaj is known for creating fantastical and immersive spaces that fuse childhood wonder with the personal and political history of his homeland. Using a variety of artistic languages—sculpture, drawing, text, and performance—Halilaj transforms the signs and symbols of innocence into three-dimensional dreamscapes and multi-layered installations that incorporate narrative and mythic performances and harness symbolism and fantasy as a force for hope and healing.

“In his installations and performances, where drawings acquire a sculptural presence and the space of the imagination is literally unleashed, Petrit Halilaj reveals how experiences of pain are inextricably bound to moments of joy, tenderness, and connection,” says Director Carlos Basualdo. “His work is particularly resonant today 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. By choosing Halilaj, the Nasher Prize jury recognizes his work as both formally innovative and deeply relevant for the current moment.”

In the late 1990’s, Halilaj’s childhood was shattered by the outbreak of the Kosovo War, transforming his formerly peaceful, pastoral environment into one of fear, violence, and displacement. In 1998, at just 13 years of age, Halilaj’s village was destroyed by Serbian forces, and his home was burned to the ground, forcing his family to flee to a refugee camp in Albania. In the depths of crisis, Halilaj encountered Italian psychologist Giacomo Poli, who was leading an art workshop for child refugees in the camp. Poli encouraged him to draw his memories and dreams as a way to process the trauma he endured—a lesson he has held close throughout his career. At the age of 18 he moved to Italy and studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan, moving to Berlin in 2009 where his notoriety as an innovative artist quickly grew.

In stunning ways, Halilaj’s art consistently revisits the formative childhood moments from the perspective of his own biography to represent a collective memory and unearth universal notions of joy and sorrow within his own experiences. Often his past enters his work directly, as in The places I’m looking for, my dear, are utopian places, they are boring and I don’t know how to make them real, where he applied funds from his 2010 Berlin Biennale commission to build a new home for his parents in Pristina, Kosovo, reassembling the wooden slats used to cast its concrete frame as a sculptural “skeleton” inside Berlin’s KW Institute for Contemporary Art. Live chickens wandered freely among viewers, introducing an avian leitmotif present throughout his career. For his 2021 exhibition at Tate St. Ives, titled Very Volcanic Over This Green Feather, Petrit exhibited over 80 felt-made suspended elements, each enlarged and remixed replicas from 38 drawings he originally made with Poli in the camp in 1999. Colorful depictions of animals and trees overlapped amid scenes of war and destruction, resulting in a traversable maze of real and imagined terror and fanciful escape. In 2023, for a mid-career presentation at the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City, Halilaj installed a large-scale drawing on a 747 Boeing aircraft from the Aeromexico fleet, effectively making a flying sculpture that crossed borders across the Americas for the duration of the exhibition and alluding to the impossibility of free travel for Kosovar citizens.

Halilaj’s ability to transform drawing into sculpture is among his most remarkable achievements. For The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2024 Roof Garden Commission titled Abetare, the artist revisited a 2015 project of the same name, recording thousands of drawings from children’s school desks, spanning generations of graffiti from schools—initially from Kosovo, then from throughout the Balkans—for the Met commission where he transformed them into stainless and bronze sculptures. In these works, Halilaj invokes the imaginative reach of childhood vision and memory, ranging from the frightening to the comforting, magnifying school day doodles into markers of history, culture, and universality.

Just as Halilaj’s personal memories persist in his work, so does the presence of Runik and Kosovar history and culture. For his Shkrepëtima project in 2018, Halilaj focused on his hometown, in particular the Runik’s former House of Culture, which was a longtime symbol of memory and learning in the region before it was partially destroyed during the Kosovo War, then left abandoned. With the help of community members, Halilaj cleaned up the space and renovated it to make it suitable for a theatrical performance he organized, finally re-purposing the project’s materials in the exhibition space of the Fondazione Merz in Turin, creating a stage-like experience using the sets, costumes and props of the performance. Halilaj repeats this dialogue between installation and performance again in his 2025 opera Syrigana. The five-act opera reinterprets a Kosovar legend where Adam and Eve come to the Kosovar village of Syrigana to marry after they are expelled from Eden. The performance, which was performed in Syrigana, Kosovo in collaboration with the Kosovo Philharmonic, forms the center piece for an exhibition at Hamburger Bahnhof, An Opera Out of Time, open September 2025 – May 2026.

The 2018 exhibition Ru at the New Museum in New York directly referenced the material heritage of Runik as one of the earliest Neolithic settlements in the region, recreating over 500 recorded objects and fragments from Kosovo’s Neolithic period, transforming them into birds nestled within a giant nest or grouped as standing flocks representing their migratory nature. The exhibition exemplifies Halilaj’s desire to blur history and imagination but also his continued incorporation of birds and nests as symbols of safety, freedom, and migration.

In his 2020 exhibition at the Palacio de Cristal, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, he referenced the courtship rituals specific to bowerbirds, which decorate their nests with colorful objects to attract a mate. Titled To a raven and hurricanes from unknown places that bring back smells of humans in love, Halilaj transformed the glass-clad space into an aviary of sorts, inviting birds through open windows and feeding stations to fly amongst a large brass and bronze sculpture of a bird’s foot, an anthropomorphic white raven figure, and giant painted canvas flowers made in collaboration with his partner and long-time collaborator, artist Álvaro Urbano. The exhibition served as a metaphorical act of union for the artists, who were married that same year, but also as a wider celebration of diversity and acceptance, further demonstrating Halilaj’s interest in merging the personal and the universal.