Sculpture 21st: Flaka Haliti
28 November 2025 to 8 March 2026
The works of Flaka Haliti (*1982, Prishtina) captivate with their lightness and the artist’s ability to give political conditions a poetic form. In her installations, which envelop us with all our senses, Haliti explores the meanings of boundaries, democracy, and freedom.
Flaka Haliti, Its urgency got lost in reverse (while being in constant delay) #2, © artist
Flaka Haliti uses everyday objects and materials familiar to all of us, transforming them into forms that appear irresistibly alluring. With her characteristic sense of humor, she gives shape—and sometimes even a face—to the intangible. “As our times are loaded with contradictions, clashes, and inhuman discriminations, I try to investigate how agency and integrity are produced or lost in such regimes of paradoxicality and violence,” Haliti explains. Based on her exploration of belonging and identity, the artist places the effects of displacement, migration, and geopolitical isolation at the center of her art. In doing so, she develops a visual language that questions military structures and transforms them into a demilitarized aesthetic.
In her series of works entitled “Its urgency got lost in reverse (while being in constant delay)” Haliti addresses the ongoing tensions in her homeland of Kosovo. Haliti transforms the remains of abandoned military camps belonging to the Kosovo Force (KFOR) under the leadership of the NATO peacekeeping mission into colorful sculptures: robots that appear to be indulging in idleness.
With “Every Window Thinks of Itself as Being an Opening”, Flaka Haliti takes a line from Etel Adnan’s poetry collection Sea and Fog (2012) as the title of her large-scale work, created as part of the series Sculpture 21st. The piece engages in a striking dialogue with the transparency of the glass hall. It addresses the significance of openness, inclusion, and exclusion. Remnants of former NATO military bases from Kosovo embody militarization and its consequences. In light of the ongoing arms buildup across Europe, her work feels more relevant than ever.
With her debut at the Venice Biennale in 2015, Flaka Haliti gained international recognition as an important representative of a young generation of artists. By representing her home country, Kosovo, at the Biennale, her work received one of the highest honors in the field of visual arts.
The exhibition is supported by the Stiftung Kunst, Kultur und Soziales der Sparda-Bank West.
