Petrit Halilaj’s series RU began in 2017 as part of the major exhibition at the New Museum, New York.

The eponymous exhibition, RU, presented a large-scale installation wherein 505 found and recorded Neolithic objects from his native city Runik were recreated to scale using clay and installed in a dense woodland environment. Given brass legs, these artifacts are imagined as migratory birds reunited on a temporary stopover. As scaled-down versions of the original installation, this work dives into Runik’s regional history. As the site of one of the earliest Neolithic settlements in the region, many artifacts including the musical wind instrument known as the Runik Ocarina were uncovered in 1968 and 1983 archaeological digs. Now spread across two countries and several institutions as the result of the Kosovo War in the 1990s, the most valuable of these objects currently reside in storage at the Natural History Museum in Belgrade, with the less significant finds still kept at the Kosovo Museum in Pristina. Halilaj undertook the task of replicating significant artefacts evoking the migratory pattern of birds, who have the ability to transcend borders and the right to come back to their place of origin.