Sarajevo: art in extremis - art from Bosnia-Herzegovina - Kunsthalle, New York, New York - Cover Story

Art in America, May, 1994 by Jamey Gambrell

A recent war and Holocaust memorials have taught, artists commemorating the victims of war are thrust into the complex diplomacy of history and emotion. When the fighting is over, the dead are the only incontrovertible facts. The national ambitions and political passions that killed them may grow dull with the passing of time, or be refashioned to serve the demands of the present. But death remains constant. Artists must negotiate their way thtrough the inequities of both victory and defeat, through ethics and esthetics, in order to find images that will honor the dead. To do so without hyperbole or sentimentality, without serving myths of demonization or innocence, is a nearly impossible task. How much more difficult the negotiation then, in the midst of war, when survival itself is still at stake. "Witnesses of Existence, an exhibition of art, from the besieged city of Sarajevo which appeared at the New York Kunsthalle this spring, managed this negotiation with extraordinary delicacy.

The Kunsthalle show came from Sarajevo's Obala Gallery and was to have represented Bosnia-Herzegovina at last summer's Venice Biennale. But the U.N., which now controls all movement of people and goods in and out of Sarajevo, refused to cooperate, and the works did not make it to Venice. Finally, after the intervention of U.N. officials who were impressed by the art and began to frequent the gallery, arrangements were made for the works, the director of the gallery and several of the artists to travel to New York for this exhibition. They traveled by U.N. transport planes to Ancona, Italy; the Soros Foundation underwrote transportation costs from Italy to New York.

It was the first time any of the artists had left Sarajevo since the siege began two years ago, and the first time the U.N. had agreed to transport any cultural artifacts. Shortly after the artists arrived in New York, the Bosnian Serbs, threatened with NATO air strikes and nudged by the Russians, agreed to withdraw their artillery from the hills surrounding Sarajevo; as of this writing the cease-fire is still holding. In conjunction with the exhibition, the Kunsthalle held a series of public roundtables, poetry readings, film showings and gallery talks with the participation of such well-known figures as Susan Sontag and Vanessa Redgrave.

The Obala Gallery in Sarajevo was originally a cultural center housed in a small space on the Bosnia river ("obala" means riverside); its theater group toured Europe, foreign rock bands that came to Sarajevo played there, and the gallery showed avant-garde films, exhibited art works and hosted performances. In 1991 Obala decided to expand, and rented a large space in the center of town. Reconstruction was completed in April 1992. Just weeks later, on May 9 (the anniversary of the German surrender, widely celebrated in Eastern Europe as the end of World War II), the new space was hit by Serb fire and burned; only the shell of the building remained. The gallery moved back to its cramped former quarters, which were still intact. "Witnesses of Existence" grew out of a series of homages to the destroyed new space. Gallery director Mirsad Purivatra invited a group of Sarajevan artists (all men) to install one-day solo shows in the ruined gallery. These were held approximately every two weeks from December '92 through spring '93; in April '93 a group show was held at the original space and each of the artists contributed a performance as well.

The bombed Obala Gallery is located in an area of Sarajevo that has been subject to frequent Serb attack, and what is left of the building offers cover from sniper fire and relatively safe passage across a very dangerous stretch of territory. Because of this, thousands of Sarajevans saw these exhibitions. A documentary film, on view at the Kunsthalle, by young Sarajevan filmmaker Srdan Vuletic, captured the eerie spectacle: erratic processions of people entering from bright, doorless apertures and passing through the spooky, cavernous ruins. Some of the passersby glance curiously at their surroundings and slow down to look at the art works; others walk straight through, pausing only at the gaping holes on the building's other side to peer out cautiously. When they feel the coast is clear, they dart out of the darkness and into the perilous dayfight.

The New York Kunsthalle is itself a ruin: it is a large, raw gallery space with dim lighting, stripped brick walls and scuffed floors; much of its ceiling is missing due to a fire two years ago. Thus the Kunsthalle was a particularly appropriate setting for "Witnesses." The art works were dictated by the conditions of life in besieged Sarajevo, where there is no electricity, no heat, little food and water and certainly no art materials, Sarajevans frequently speak of their city as a ghetto or concentration camp, a place where, as Azra Begic, curator of the Art Gallery of Bosnia and Herzegovina, writes in the exhibition catalogue, "each and every direction . . . [leads] to the same place: to a hoop of heavy artillery which, like a mythic dragon, daily spouts fire and inflammable projectiles, which massacre, murder and destroy all that stands in their path." The artists made use of whatever materials the ruined city offered. As the title of the exhibition puts it, their works bear witness to existence, to human perseverance under extreme circumstances.