Flaka Haliti

The work of Flaka Haliti, who originates from Kosovo, revolves around questions relating to society, which Haliti describes with analytical insight using a wide variety of media.

The photographic installation Now You Are So Well is based on a personal experience of the artist. During her time as a student at the Städelschule art academy in Frankfurt, a search for a part-time job led the young artist to a chicken farm outside the city. She was shocked by the systematic division of the chickens into two separate facilities: one for those capable of producing eggs and another for those who could no longer lay. The latter group were destined directly for the slaughterhouse. Flaka Haliti resigned from her part-time job. But she did not drop the issue – not once she found out that it was the eggs from this chicken farm that were used in the canteen of the art academy where she herself studied.

The painful truth regarding infertility as a criteria for exclusion and the economic cycle of production, distribution and consumption inspired Haliti to create her work Now You Are So Well. The artist spread the feathers of the rejected chickens on the glass roof of the canteen and documented her temporary installation in photographs. A section of a quote that artist Raymond Pettibon left behind on the wall of the canteen in the 1990s during a visit to the Städelschule art academy then also became a part of Flaka Haliti‘s work, exuding a magnetic pull on her during her day-to-day breaks from her work.

Now You Are So Well is a poetic representation of concreted ideas spanning the private experience of the artist and the confrontation of a core social problem of livestock farming and the disposal of animals. Haliti intends for her work to be presented in the area between the guest cafeteria and the employee canteen, thereby providing an additional point of reference.

Flaka Haliti (born in Pristina, Kosovo in 1982) lives and works in Munich, Pristina and Vienna.