Very volcanic over this green feather
2021
- Medium
- felt
- Measurements
- (1-39) 585.5 × 1423.0 × 1373.0 cm (variable) (installation)
- Place/s of Execution
- Italy
- Accession Number
- 2024.116
- Department
- Contemporary Art
- Credit Line
- National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Originally conceived and commissioned for Tate St Ives, 2021. Purchased with funds donated by Barry Janes and Paul Cross, Nick Perkins and Paul Banks, Sarah Cronin, Samuel Cronin and Bradley Cronin, Sophie and Simon Crowe, Donors to the 2024 NGV Summer Appeal, and NGV Foundation, 2024
© Petrit Halilaj - Gallery location
- Not on display
- About this work
-
Displaced along with members of his immediate family during the Kosovo War (1998–99), Petrit Halilaj’s Very volcanic over this green feather explores his experience as a thirteen-year-old refugee living for more than two years in Kukes II camp in Albania. Art materials were distributed to children at the camp by visiting Italian psychologist Giacomo Poli. Poli encouraged the children to externalise and process their experiences through drawing. Spotting his talent, Poli would much later arrange for Halilaj to attend art school in Italy.
Halilaj’s re discovery of these felt-tip pen drawings inspired the creation of this large-scale installation which takes thirty-six drawings from the artist’s childhood experience as the basis for a visual and physical journey through the artist’s memory. The work reveals the complex and ever-changing relationships between reality and the imagination, personal history and collective trauma, official histories and lived experiences. Symbols as varied as the Garden of Eden and its birds, trees and flowers are interspersed with images of war and trauma. Transferred to thick felt and suspended, the drawings appear as a theatre set or a landscape, where the fragmented visions of war and peace sit side by side.