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Dreidimensional ziehen sich diese riesigen Krakeleien, Herzen, Sterne, Maschinengewehre, Vögel, Schriftzüge wie KFOR oder UCK durch den sonnendurchfluteten Bau der Nachkriegsmoderne. Sie ballen sich an der Decke, umzingeln Türrahmen, krallen sich an Treppengeländern fest, werfen Schatten und Spiegelschriften.
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ABETARE are the school booklets that every child in Kosovo knows and that Halilaj grew up with. The film showing the destruction of the village school is repeatedly interrupted by book pages with idealized illustrations, letters, and writing exercises, like a foil that no longer matches reality. For his installation at the Kölnischer Kunstverein, the artist created a different kind of alphabet out of these overlapping levels. He used thin steel rods to reconstruct, on a much larger scale, the doodles, drawings, and comments covering the furniture and the classroom, which in the film he appraises together with the children. Three dimensionally, these giant scribbles, hearts, stars, machine guns, birds, and insignias like KFOR and UCK pervaded the sun-flooded postwar modern building. They were concentrated on the ceiling, encircled doorframes, clung to banisters, cast shadows, and created mirror images. In the basement, old desks were piled on top of one another. The artist gave some of them legs so long that they rise up through the stairwell to the upper floors. It looked like the aftermath of a bombing. With his intervention, Halilaj filled the museum with these scrawls, creating a direct, semiotic experience. Thinking of A Lover's Discourse: Fragments, the famous treatise by the poststructuralist and semiotic theorist Roland Barthes, one could say that Halilaj brought together something like fragments of a language of war and conflict - all the standards and constraints, the clichés and gender roles children are confronted with from a very early age. In addition, the installation has an imaginative and poetic aspect that cannot be pinned down, that flutters lightly like a butterfly, and from a position of vulnerability produces something new and original.
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