The Nasher Sculpture Center has named Kosovar artist Petrit Halilaj the 2027 Nasher Prize Laureate, awarding him the $100,000 distinction that has become one of the most influential honors in contemporary sculpture. At 39, Halilaj is the ninth and youngest recipient of the prize, recognized for a practice that folds biography, history, and imagination into installations that blur the line between sculpture, drawing, and performance. Since its inception in 2016, the Nasher Prize has honored artists including Doris Salcedo, Pierre Huyghe, Theaster Gates, Isa Genzken, Michael Rakowitz, Nairy Baghramian, Senga Nengudi, and Otobong Nkanga. To that list, Halilaj adds a body of work that insists sculpture is as much about memory and belonging as it is about form.
In accordance with the artist’s wishes, the full award will be donated to Hajde! Foundation, the nonprofit Halilaj co-founded with his sister, curator Hana Halilaj, in 2014. Based in Kosovo, Hajde! creates opportunities for artists and is currently revitalizing the House of Culture in Runik, the town where Halilaj grew up before it was scarred by war. “I am deeply humbled by the recognition and generous gift of the Nasher Prize, which I am proud to dedicate in its entirety to Hajde! Foundation,” Halilaj said, underscoring the foundation’s mission “to create possibilities for art to resonate both locally and beyond.”
Born in 1986 in Kostërrc, a village outside Runik, Halilaj lived through the Kosovo War, and in 1998 his family home was destroyed. At 13 he fled with his family to a refugee camp in Albania, where an Italian psychologist encouraged him to draw his memories as a way of surviving trauma. That experience remains central to his practice, which often channels the imagination of childhood into expansive installations. Birds, nests, and houses appear throughout his work as symbols of shelter, migration, and fragility. At the 2010 Berlin Biennale, he used his commission to build a new home for his parents, transplanting its wooden frame into Berlin’s KW Institute for Contemporary Art where live chickens roamed among visitors. At Tate St. Ives in 2021, he suspended more than 80 felt forms based on drawings he made as a refugee, a traversable forest of remembered and reimagined images. For his mid-career exhibition at the Museo Tamayo in 2023, he painted a 747 Boeing aircraft, turning it into a flying sculpture and a blunt metaphor for the impossibility of free travel for many Kosovar citizens.
Halilaj’s ability to transform drawing into sculpture has been one of his most distinctive achievements. For The Met’s Roof Garden Commission in 2024, he enlarged graffiti scrawled by generations of Kosovar students into bronze and stainless-steel sculptures, magnifying doodles into monuments. In Madrid in 2020, he and his partner, artist Álvaro Urbano, turned the Palacio de Cristal into an aviary where giant painted flowers, bronze bird forms, and open windows invited living birds inside, an installation that doubled as a metaphorical act of union as the artists married that year. Other projects remain directly tied to Runik: the 2018 Shkrepëtima revived the abandoned House of Culture through a community performance later reimagined for exhibition at Fondazione Merz, while his 2025 opera Syrigana, staged in a Kosovar village with the Kosovo Philharmonic, retold a local legend of Adam and Eve and now anchors his exhibition An Opera Out of Time at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin.
Nasher Director Carlos Basualdo calls his work “formally innovative and deeply relevant for the current moment,” noting how Halilaj creates spaces of encounter that “transcend artistic, cultural, and geographic boundaries.” It is a description that fits an artist whose projects often slip between installation, performance, and social practice, and whose work transforms the personal into the universal with a clarity that feels both urgent and restorative. With this year’s announcement, the Nasher Prize affirms its role not just as a Dallas institution but as a global arbiter in sculpture, and in Halilaj it has chosen an artist who makes memory itself into a sculptural medium, binding loss and imagination into forms that open toward community and hope.