Brilant Milazimi – Transparent body, foggy future, 2026

Life and death inhabit the same body in Brilant Milazimi’s seven-metre portrait of a skeleton. Created in Kosovo, where, more than twenty-five years after the 1998–99 war, many of those who disappeared have yet to be located and identified, the work refuses to distinguish the living from the dead. The figure’s mouth remains wide open, while its hands rest across the lower body like those of someone laid out for burial. Its childlike face sits uneasily atop the elongated skeleton, as though different moments of a single life had come to inhabit the same body. Yet the upright posture resists the finality of death. The neck bends against the upper edge of the canvas, giving the figure a semblance of having outgrown the space that contains it, leaving uncertain whether it is emerging from the earth or returning to it.

Brilant Milazimi lives and works in Pristina, Kosovo. He translates his perception of the world that surrounds him into images that are bitter, funny, tender, and weird all at the same time. Driven by the machinery of the unconscious, and inspired by the imaginaries of fictional universes, he finds expressions both sinister and poetical for an approach to the society he lives in: the exaggerated physiognomies and the highlighted symbolism of the teeth or the features of the animals are visual manifestations that point to the present and its conflicts.