Flaka Haliti
Flaka Haliti interdisciplinary practice spans mixed media, sculpture, and spatial installation. Situated between abstraction and representation, and informed by artistic research, critical theory, and material experimentation, her work addresses belonging, subjectivity, human-animal relations, displacement, migration, transnationality, and territoriality, with a long time focus on the demilitarization of aesthetics. It examines the entanglement of aesthetic regimes and military logics in shaping contemporary socio-political imaginaries.
Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions at major international biennials and institutions, including the Venice Biennale, Busan Biennale, Manifesta 14, the Moscow Biennale, steirischer herbst '22, and the Baltic Triennial 14, as well as museums such as mumok, Lenbachhaus, Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum Ludwig, Lehmbruck Museum, and the National Gallery of Tirana, among others. She was shortlisted for the Preis der Nationalgalerie (2019) and is a recipient of the Ars Viva Prize (2015/16), the Ludwig Gies Prize (2019), the Henkel Art Award (2014), awards associated with the Fellbach Triennial and mumok, among others.
I SHOUT, YOUR ECHO BOUNCE, WHAT AM I?
2023
Paint, print, drawing, plastic film, plexiglass, LEDs
180 × 100 cm each
Courtesy Christine König Galerie, Vienna, Deborah Schamoni, Munich and the artist
This body of work by Flaka Haliti (b. 1982, Pristina) stages sculpture as a riddle in motion, where form emerges through relation rather than fixed state. The suspended figures evoke bats – creatures that navigate through echolocation – which turn sound into space and space into a matter of resonance. The sense of self is here never direct, but returned, altered, and shaped by its surroundings.
In Haliti’s work, composition is never singular. Shifting between smooth, synthetic skins and fragile, skeletal structures, their materiality suggests both resilience and vulnerability. An illuminated snakelike tube coils through them, and has predator and prey collapse into one unstable figure. This entanglement produces a speculative third term: a possible dragon, a harbinger of future myths, and a hybrid in the process of becoming.
The installation unfolds as a field of transformation – where categories dissolve and meaning remains suspended. Echo becomes both method and condition, a way of navigating uncertainty. What begins as a question, what am I?, never resolves, but multiplies, suggesting identity as something contingent on the topographies through which we move.
Haliti’s practice is shaped by displacement, migration, and the geopolitical afterlives of the military presence in the Balkans. Working between Kosovo and Germany, the artist explores how its aesthetics, both in physical and perceptual forms, shape what can be seen, known, or safely expressed.