"Art is the last outpost of dialogue": Belgrade Biennial curators on Halilaj case

The curators of the 2020 edition of the Belgrade Biennale, the Italians Ilaria Marotta and Andrea Baccin, intervene on the Petrit Halilaj affair: as we reported on these pages last week, the Kosovar artist born in 1986, initially invited to take part in the “October Salon” (this is the official name of the Serbian exhibition), which this year reaches its 58th edition, had decided to withdraw as he was unable, for political reasons, to participate by seeing his nationality recognized (as is well known, Serbia is one of the countries that, in the context of international relations, do not recognize the independence of Kosovo). Halilaj had expressed his reasons in a long letter, recounting how the events unfolded, stressing that what emerged from his words was obviously his version of events, and wondering whether art institutions are still able to dream, since The Dreamers is the theme of this Belgrade Biennial (which, moreover, has been postponed to 2021 due to the continuation of the Covid-19 health emergency).

Halilaj was supposed to present a video entitled Shkrepëtima (Flash of Light), which tells of the rebirth of the House of Culture in Runik, Kosovo, after the disasters of the war, through a theatrical performance held in Runik itself, among the ruins of the House: the concretization of a dream that, according to the artist, was very fitting with the theme of the exhibition, as, Halilaj himself wrote, “dedicated to the dreams of the citizens of Runik.” “In a parallelism between the artistic dimension and the real world,” the two curators’ text in the Belgrade Biennial catalog reads instead, "Petrit Halilaj’s work Shkrepëtima (2018) becomes the stage for a concerted performance around the figure of a dreamer, around whom moves a dreamlike, ritualistic and propitiatory orchestration of rebirth and resurrection of the house of culture of the city of Runik in Kosovo, thus restored to its original functions. It is a dream within a dream. Petrit Halilaj’s work, withdrawn from the exhibition, tells of a yet unrealized dream, the full recognition of one’s history, political and cultural identity." The decision to withdraw from the exhibition was made after a long dialogue with the organization of the Salon and with Marotta and Baccin themselves, who in recent hours in turn published a letter in English on the home page of the magazine CURA., of which the two are editors. We publish below the full Italian version of the missive.

There are two terms that recur in our minds in these days and in these last weeks: real / presence.

We will not begrudge Biljana Tomic and Dobrila Denegri if we remotely appropriate the title of the artistic and cultural event, Real Presence, which they inaugurated in the early 2000s and which after the long and painful Balkan War and the bombings of 1999 marked the rebirth of cultural life in the city of Belgrade. When Real Presence opened its doors in 2001 Harald Szeemann, invited by the two curators, said, I remember at La Biennale di Venezia in 1999, the bombing of Belgrade ceased the night before the opening. We were all relieved. Now attending the opening of Real Presence another successful initiative of Biljana and her wonderful daughter Dobrila I saw what the stupid smart bombs had done to the city in 1999. What Biljana and Dobrila wanted to accomplish was not to add yet another event to the already overcrowded art agenda, but to give a piece of life to the capital of a changing nation. It was great to see the hundreds of students and young artists from all over the world gathering around the Tito Museum, near his mausoleum, with their bags and backpacks, ready after an initial meeting to occupy the different places in the city, an ideal ground for their works, actions, performances and events. I was lucky to be there. The oldest Biennale in the world, La Biennale di Venezia, is today not only an art exhibition but the opportunity and chance for many nations old and new to show their interest in a complex and layered Europe. But the Biennale cannot just passively wait for others. It must go where the Royal Presences are and be part of their energies. Thank you Biljana and Dobrila for what you offered these 300 young artists and for showing that Belgrade is alive. (testimony taken from the Real Presence website http://www.ica-realpresence.org/texts.html)

Twenty years after these words, Petrit Halilaj’s renunciation of his participation in the 58th October Salon I Belgrade Biennale 2020 is a serious and radical fact, and even more so it represents a human and professional regret for us who have tried in the past months to be cultural mediators between the artist and the Belgrade Cultural Center.

Petrit Halilaj is an artist we have always esteemed, and whose rigor and at the same time that vein of lightness and poetry, which is only of great artists, we have always appreciated. Published in one of the first issues of the magazine in 2009, we then got to know him the following year, when a collector in Rome, who through the magazine had intercepted and acquired his work, introduced him to us at a dinner in Basel.

Petrit Halilaj’s voice in the exhibition, or his real presence, had and would carry important weight, for it is precisely of a dreamer or dreamers that all his work speaks, and it is precisely a dreamer who is the central character of the Shkrepëtima work that would represent him in that context.

The warned affinities were not few. Not only because of the theme the exhibition aims to explore, but because the House of Culture in Runik, reactivated and brought back into operation thanks to Petrit’s work as part of a total work, is comparable in many ways to the nerve center of the community represented by the Cultural Center in Belgrade, which is the heart of the Serbian city’s cultural life.

Petrit’s Dreamer represented in our idea somewhat the emblematic figure of the reversal between dream and reality, between larte and its transformative power, an honorary citizen of that metaphorical space of freedom that only larte can be. As curators of the 58th October Salon I Belgrade Biennale 2020, which already postponed once has now been postponed to 2021, due to the health emergency in Serbia we were invited by the Board of theOctober Salon to conceive an exhibition that in the wake of the long tradition of this event could represent the art scene of Serbia in an open dialogue with an international context. For months we worked alongside a professional, collaborative, curious and open team, under the banner of mutual trust, of interest in all the invited artists, first shared with them, through which to offer as broad and complex a look at the contemporary, a plurality of voices and looks at the complexity of the times in which we live.

This has included artists from all over the world, many from the Balkan area, young Serbian artists, who are given a first international audience, other artists coming from or originating in Bosnia, Croatia, Kosovo, Albania, aware that we are in a geopolitical area that in the last century has been the epicenter of European history and that still today lives with its own contradictions and struggles to heal and metabolize wounds that are still open.

We would like to be able to say that the facts recounted are not real, but they are facts with which we have all had to come to terms and against which, as free people, to make decisions. Political elections held in the same weeks as the facts recounted, city protests and an upsurge in the health care emergency have left little room for the latest attempts at mediation.

Never before have we felt more than today how freedom is a goal to be defended. A troubled and very recent history bears witness to this, and even more so we would have imagined with Petrit a more incisive, constructive, real action.

In a city like Belgrade, still plagued by a heavy political and cultural legacy, the opportunity for a presentation of Petrit Halilaj’s work would have had an almost revolutionary, and certainly liberating, sense for a city in which a spirit of freedom, emancipation, and truth is mounting today, which is being claimed at many levels, to clear itself from history, though without disowning it, so that the sins of the fathers should not continue to fall on the children, generation after generation. Indeed, we are convinced that history needs a turning point, a second chance, and as curators we have attempted to offer that opportunity to both sides, through the art, the works, and the exhibition itself. It was an attempt at a new dialogue, where not only Petrit’s work would have a particularly significant impact, but also the work of the other invited artists, because of the visionary power of their thinking in a rapidly changing world.

Of course, bringing Kosovo into the heart of a city that politically does not recognize Kosovo as an independent nation would have created the space for expression, debate and confrontation that exhibitions such as this one must be able to offer, concretely and constructively creating that bridge we have long talked about. Just as, moreover, Petrit did recently in a beautiful exhibition opened at the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, where another institution managed to get the inclusion of his country of origin next to his name, despite the fact that even Spain does not recognize Kosovo as an independent state.

If even international diplomacy fails to achieve a dialogue between Serbia and Kosovo (see the latest failed meetings in Brussels and Washington), we believe, and we are convinced, that the last outpost is the art.

As curators of the exhibition, we tried to mediate between what we felt was an obvious right of Petrit, and respect for the institution that invited us, as well as respect for other points of view, and other perspectives. Petrit thought hard before making his decision, but he felt that he did not have the appropriate space to present his work, in response to what had happened, and, not sure how he could have responded forcefully, like a free bird he decided to fly away.

The curatorial team at the Cultural Center Belgrade never censored Petrit Halilaj’s work, never would have allowed there to be a misreading of Shkrepëtima, nor an instrumentalization of the work. Rather, he insisted that Petrit Halilaj pursue his participation, and he still renews his invitation to Petrit today. The Cultural Center of Belgrade is an organization that, with all the difficulties involved, has attempted mediation, unsuccessful but attempted. Progress is also made of unsuccessful attempts.

Petrit’s letter also intended to open a dialogue. So this was his attempt, which we hope will provide all of us with an important opportunity to build something concrete, despite the risk of running into inevitable reactions from all sides, exacerbating resentment and disappointment, and raising barriers that will be difficult to break down for the people involved on one side and the other. In fact, we are convinced that his attempt should have been aimed at a concrete action in the field of art, a possibility that was offered to him in every way, looking for his audience in the new Serbian generation, which represents perhaps the only significant interlocutor in this context, which would have really deserved to be able to be confronted with new voices and perspectives.

Because if we believe in the transformative power of art, this is where Petrit Halilaj’s work would have really made sense. It would also have been important because in a city like Belgrade art is not what it has become in the countries we live in-sociality, status-symbol, power, market-but it is a bulwark of freedom and confrontation through which to foster a debate that goes beyond politics, in that arena of expression that art at all levels represents. And it is precisely in this context that the Belgrade Cultural Center represents an outpost of cultural resistance, producing four exhibitions a month in the center’s four galleries, and animating the vital heart of the Belgrade community, with wide and heartfelt public participation.

We do not think that the Belgrade Cultural Center can be called an institution that does not allow artists to dream. Artists dream regardless of institutions. They have the wonderful ability to do so and to pose even against the institutions themselves.

It is true that Serbia does not recognize Kosovo as an independent nation, along with 96 other countries of the 193 members of the United Nations, among them Spain, Greece, Romania... But if we do not think that larte can go beyond geographic, political, gender, race and religious boundaries then we should all question our own failure. Which is not a personal or professional failure, it is not the failure of an exhibition, an institution, or a specific case but it is a structural failure.

The sending away of the doriginal countries, although it took something away from the complexity of the voices in the field, was a discussed and shared decision, not after but before Petrit Halilaj’s withdrawal and not related to his absence but to the desire for his real presence, so much so that it was kept even afterwards, to underline a trace, a passage, a possible future dialogue, in line with the idea of the exhibition where the dreamers become the inhabitants of the zone of passage that Walter Benjamin called threshold, distinguishing it from the borderline.

Much love,
Ilaria, Andrea

Pictured, Petrit Halilaj, Shkrepëtima (2018; frame from video, single channel video, sound, duration 3710). Produced by Merz Foundation and Hajde! Foundation. Courtesy lartist; Fondazione Merz, Turin; ChertLüdde, Berlin; and kamel mennour, Paris/London.

"Art is the last outpost of dialogue": Belgrade Biennial curators on Halilaj case

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