In 2010, having graduated from Brera Academy and moved to Berlin, Halilaj participated in the Berlin Biennale. It was his debut show on the global stage. When he learned that he’d be given a budget of about 30,000 euros for his Biennale contribution, he realized he could use part of the money to help build the house that his parents dreamed of having in Pristina, in order to give their younger children better educational opportunities. The piece he made for the Biennale was a life-size replica, a ghost image of the framework of their long-lost house. It was exhibited with live chickens roaming around and through it, just as they had been back in Halilaj’s childhood home, and it bore one of his long poetic titles: The places I’m looking for, my dear, are utopian places, they are boring and I don’t know how to make them real. The actual Pristina house was eventually finished by his parents. “My parents currently live in it,” he says, “and my four siblings were also there until they moved out.” Elena Filipovic, who curated a Halilaj show at Wiels Contemporary Art Center in Brussels in 2013, describes his Berlin exhibition as “not art imitating life or even the inverse, but real life made into an art form.”
Chickens have played a large part in Halilaj’s art and life. “I talked to chickens as a chicken, in their language, when I was a kid,” he says. For a group show in Istanbul in 2008, he lived with chickens in a house he had built in a children’s playground. (The piece is titled They are Lucky to be Bourgeois Hens.) And he began his ongoing drawing series of Bourgeois Hens—pencil sketches of fowl with a regal manner—in 2009. Halilaj’s mantra is coexistence. He wasn’t allowed to bring live chickens to “Runik,” his current show at the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City, where he has reinstalled his Berlin Biennale ghost house. Instead, he brought 50 examples of the birds and creatures and costumes that he had made over the past 13 years. “The costumes are alter egos that tell stories,” he explains. (He wears them and performs at openings—he’s been a white raven, a chicken, a raccoon, a moth, among other life forms.) As part of the show, he painted a large-scale chicken spreading its wings in flight on the body of an Aeroméxico Boeing 737. The plane became what he calls “a political flying chicken,” crossing borders throughout the Americas without a visa.
In 2011, at Berghain, the famously louche techno club in Berlin, the artist Álvaro Urbano danced up to Halilaj and said, “Are you the chicken guy?” They met again two months later. Soon after that, they started living together, along with 12 uncaged and free-flying canaries. In 2020 they married in a joyous celebration in their studio and home. “It was the most emotional and beautiful day of my life,” Halilaj says.
Nine months later, their joint installation “Forget Me Not,” a spectacle of giant fabric flowers suspended from a glass dome ceiling, opened at the National Library of Kosovo in Pristina. It was timed to coincide with the fifth annual Pristina Pride Week. All the flowers had some connection to the artists’ lives, including an exact replica of the lily that was in their engagement bouquet. Halilaj has been in the forefront of the gay rights movement, lobbying the prime minister of Kosovo for LGBTQIA+ rights, especially the right to marry, in the new civil code that is being written. “This law is extremely important to ensure that the whole society will have the same rights,” Halilaj says, “and that there is space for everyone to love and to live.” Once a year, Halilaj and Urbano travel to a country they’ve never been to before. They spent Christmas this year in Morocco, with three days in the desert and no phones, and then, on the way home, went to Madrid for New Year’s celebrations with Urbano’s large Spanish family.