ART BASEL

"If there was one booth that caught my eye and seemed an apt metaphor for the fair’s crush of art, it was Petrit Halilaj’s exceptional Statement for Chert, Berlin. Titled Kostërrc (CH) (2011), the work—which filled Chert’s entire booth, leaving its gallerists to hover in the lane just outside—comprised a perfect wave of dirt about to break. At its crest was a hint of grass, like tufts of green-blue hair.

The earthy smell of the soil (60 tons of it) and the sod was oddly gratifying, and the work simultaneously conjured weight and levity, stillness and speed. The soil was excavated from the hill in Kosovo where the artist was born, then brought to Switzerland on a truck. Like the artist’s larger body of work (he has an evocative earthwork in the current “based in Berlin” exhibition wonderfully titled Astronauts saw my work and started laughing), Kostërrc (CH) limns absence and longing, migration and transnational politics, the natural world and an erotic, corporeal intimacy."Art Statements"

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