The timbered truss of a family house lands inside the Museo Tamayo, except where by hanging, it so heavily holds a weight able to endure the stress of gravity, that it keeps its feet from remaining firmly on the ground. Instead, home hovers before Runik, the exhibit which Petrit Halilaj names after his birthplace in Kosovo, under whose soil it was once excavated a Neolithic settlement and from where his family fled the Yugoslav wars. Above and under all, excavation and ruination’s grounds swoop on the museum, one enwreathed in Mexico City’s principal forest, and on whose heavily built surfaces Halilaj perches placidly.

Though appearing hard, the overriding frame of the show joins beams on to which are nailed wooden chunks jutting out upright in a way that perpendicularly bedecks the house’s lattice, upon whose crossing to the adjoining room, passes over partitions so as to overspread and swathe the building’s brutalist bough. High above, this new mesh is interworked alongside flowers whose prismatic stems and blooms loftily drape from the ceiling as might be sprinkling a drab firmament with airborne sweeteners. Even by the museum’s indoor pond, Halilaj inspirits Runik’s atmosphere by dangling large cutouts of drawings on strings, ever afloat and reluctant to touch terra firma, whereas on every side of the museum, soil shapes the figures of fledglings that alight and roost in concert. Of all matter, it is loam’s earthy substance which casts into birds, a translocating, stateless, air species whose unknowingness to borders Halilaj further underscores in drawings of fowl filling the much lined template of the printed form. Birds, locomotive they may be, are also among the most prized in the art history of zoology which here are taxidermically made still without their plumage. Instead, feathers amass by the corner of a ramp’s top landing as though dust settling into a domicile. Of the works that have found a place to rest, that which settles most comfortably is this heap from a pillow once belonging to the artist’s beloved one. For where else would feathers, light and floating as they are, rhapsodically come down to if not the Americas, long the place of practitioners of the plumería or the work of feather? It is feathers too that cover a bird’s body, and which Halilaj plays up when painting one of the aircrafts of Mexico’s flag carrier. Not by chance does he evocate the emotional homelessness of his feathered friends, seeing that Runik itinerates for the first time to Latin America, bringing forth past and possible habitation; to live, after all, shares an idiomatic root with to leave, especially apposite to an artist who is Kosovo-born, at one time an exile in Albania, before becoming naturalized as Italian and residing between Germany and France. On that account, it might be brought up how only an émigré could ever dream up a latitude where simultaneous with the right to live, stops dead gay and ungiving bodies in furtherance of the life left and deserving of much deliverance. Such setting free Halilaj prompts by way of a gyrating pendant bulb, the lone device in an unmoving material ecology, that is at once incandescent and chipper as if to queerly and libidinously interrupt the still and ship shape mien of exposition.

Around another hatching of haven, Halilaj unhardens the colonially-conceived homeowner, cradling more a host, through whose strewn artworks and visitors airs a dispossession as fulsome as a belonging, and from whose end to end comes full circle a refuge onto and from which one descends and takes flight. If that is the case, home might to an avian degree, be nothing but an occasion to land and take off. As in due course, if an endangered creature finds a site in favor of a safe condition, it is not just elsewhere but elsewhen, for like a nest or home, an exhibition provides shelter, fleeting its relief may be, dwells on its fugitives who not yet knowing how to touch down, flutter anew.

photos Kiko del Rosario