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In April 1992, simply earlier than Sejla Kameric turned 16, her hometown, Sarajevo, got here below siege for nearly 4 years.
The struggle in Bosnia, by which her father and two uncles have been killed, forged a shadow on Kameric, a multimedia artist who has examined struggle, peace, belonging and otherness in her oeuvre during the last 25 years.
Now, 32 years since Sarajevo turned an emblem of the dissolution and destruction of Yugoslavia, her sculpture “Cease,” a shredded white flag manufactured from fiberglass, has been put in at half-staff on the flagpole within the Campo Santo Stefano sq. in Venice.
Kameric, who divides her time between Sarajevo, Berlin and the Croatian coast, has a busy 12 months forward with an enormous solo present at Cukrarna Gallery in Ljubljana, Slovenia, in June and one other exhibition opening on the Museum of Contemporary Art of Montenegro, in Podgorica, in September.
Aside from selling a retrospective e-book of her self-portraits and textiles that was launched final 12 months, she can be engaged on an exhibition and theater efficiency with the La MaMa Experimental Theater Club in New York, which can open subsequent 12 months. She spoke about her profession to this point in a video interview, which has been edited and condensed.
How did the thought for “Cease” come about?
I used to be having a dialog with architect and curator Giulia Foscari about how the physicality of a flagpole is form of like a pavilion. If international locations do not need a pavilion, then we are able to have nations use a flagpole to run works up and down it. That is the place the dialog began.
Coming from a spot like Sarajevo, does the white flag have a good deeper that means for you?
It is simply quite simple: Humanity has misplaced the plot. The easy image of give up or peace or placing your fingers up, the child that’s holding a white flag, how are you going to shoot the child who’s holding a white flag? A couple of weeks in the past, Pope Francis triggered outrage by saying Ukraine ought to wave the white flag. But it isn’t about give up. It’s about saying, “I don’t settle for the violence.” We actually have to vary this paradigm by which victims should not the weak ones, victims are those who refuse to be violent.
A whole lot of critics of the Venice Biennale say that it’s very political when it comes to how international locations select the artists to characterize their pavilions. You come from a really politicized area. Do you are feeling that politics usually will get combined up with artwork?
A rustic that’s divided can’t implement something, so it begins to make use of artwork as a political instrument. As a younger artist, I had this perspective the place I mentioned: “OK, my nation doesn’t exist anymore. The Yugoslavian pavilion is occupied now with Serbia or Montenegro. This thought of the nationwide pavilion doesn’t resonate with me; I believe it’s improper. It’s one thing that we must always query and I’m unsure that I’d ever be part of the nationwide pavilion.”
And then clearly, just a few a long time after I used to be considering I might be subversive. Coming from this small nation in Europe, we may ship a unique message. We may speak about this range and these complicated nationwide concepts like “What is that this European otherness that exists?”
While your “Bosnian Girl” venture on the time it was launched, about 20 years in the past, felt very particular to the postwar temper within the area, there may be now a universality to the piece — dehumanizing folks by making them an “different.” Do you agree?
Yes, completely. Finally with time, it may be accepted because it was made. The piece itself didn’t change however now the studying is totally different.
I fairly often needed to struggle the identical prejudice from those that preferred the work, as a result of they thought that as a result of once I made the work, I used to be solely a Bosnian lady. Like “You made that and it’s solely this”; that’s the context. It was painful to see the recognition of the work.
Many views that have been coming from the West have been actually excluding the dialog about normal prejudice and otherness as a result of it isn’t solely a few specific geographical place or a specific struggle or gender. It is about seeing totally different shades.
Looking again over your profession, is there something that you’d do otherwise?
I continually replicate on how and what I did. And sure, I’d change many issues. Every time I make one thing I’m like, “Oh, perhaps I’d tweak this or that.” So it’s a fixed, I wouldn’t say doubt, however a mirrored image of how one thing may have occurred and what that’s.
But what stayed or remained true is that I reacted to the circumstances by which I used to be in. None of us have the privilege to do issues another way as soon as they’ve occurred, however what we are able to select is to just accept all the great and dangerous errors. If I may stay totally different lives, I’d in all probability have one life devoted solely to pictures and one other life devoted to bounce. I’d change solely the circumstances by which I needed to function. And they might, you understand, in all probability be extra peaceable.
