Von Antje Mayer.
Von Antje Mayer.
Braco Dimitrijevic
This multiple Documenta and Biennale participant is the internationally most renowned artist emanating from Sarajevo. Growing up as a painting prodigy and ski-racing ace, he shifted to conceptual art in the 1970s and proceeded to deconstruct conventional concepts of fame, history and significance. An (anti-) monumental stance ran through his work like a red thread. In 1971 he created his first “portable memorial”, a stone plaque bearing the inscription “This Could Be a Place of Historical Importance.” Serving a similar ironic process of drawing into question the authority of images and locations were the giant billboards on which he immortalised anonymous passers-by. For the 2005 competition “de/construction of a monument” organised by the Sarajevo Centre of Contemporary Art he entered a design for a monument that lies buried beneath itself. On the four perpendicular slabs of this three-metre tall block of granite an inscription was to be engraved in four languages announcing that, “buried underneath this stone lies the memorial to the victims of the War and the Cold War.”
Braco Dimitrijevic was born in 1948 in Sarajevo and today lives in Paris and New York.
Jusuf Hadzifejzovic
Following his studies in Belgrade and Düsseldorf, Hadzifejzovic came to prominence during the 1980s as a provocative performance artist. With happenings such as his “Artist Preparing for a Vernissage” or “Sleeping Through an Exhibition Opening” he targeted the public’s lack of interest in current art. Frustrated by the state’s art administration, which banished his own work as well as that of his colleagues to museum depots, he hit, in 1984, on his method, developed further since, of “depotgraphy.” Picking up objects found in the storage halls of museums and galleries, or at junk goods dealers, rubbish tips and by the roadside, Hadzifejzovic has been arranging and exhibiting these found pieces in new combinations in a spirit of Dadaist inspiration, albeit with sometimes drastic new interpretations - as in the case of the “Scarecrow Depotgraphy Bent Backwards”, featuring a woman’s dress pulled across a table, looking for all intents and purposes like a person dragged over a torturer’s wrack. Depots and city spaces serve Hadzifejzovic, in like measure, as large archives or misplaced containers of a cultural amnesia which he, like an archaeologically-trained psycho-analyst, raises once again to the surface of conscious memory.
Jusuf Hadzifejzovic was born Prijepolje in 1956, and today lives in Sarajevo and Antwerp.
Maja Bajevic
Returning from her Paris exile in 1997, Mara Bajevic became well known in Sarajevo with her series of performances entitled “Women at Work”. Together with five refugee women from Srebrenica, whose husbands had been murdered, she embroidered folkloric motifs onto the scaffold netting of the destroyed national gallery building site, she also posed a group of observers in the manner of a 17th century Dutch group portrait (an allusion to the Dutch United Nations battalion which stood by watching the Srebrenica massacre without taking any action) and she rinsed the old Tito rallying cry, “long live the unity and brotherhood of our peoples”, embroidered onto cloths, in dirty water so long until it dissolved. In this manner traditional female activities and craft techniques were transposed from their domestic environments to the public sphere and transformed into tools of criticism. But Bajevic also handled the shock of finding her home country destroyed by reacting to it with cynicism and black humour. In her video entitled “Back in Black” she featured a person in a black mask telling morbid jokes about Sarajevo, each time followed by raucous canned laughter.
Maja Bajevic was born in Sarajevo in 1967 and lives in Paris and Sarajevo.
Jasmila Zbanic
The documentary films and videos of this young director, which have been awarded numerous prizes, have also had a powerful impact in an art context. Zbanic started her career in theatre, working with Peter Schumann’s Bread and Puppet troupe, and she has also been inspired by video art. Her main theme is the traumatisation of women during the war. In her first documentary film, “After After” (1997) Zabanic recounts the story of a seven-year-old girl, who has lost her capacity for speech as a result of the events of the war, and who has to find her way, step by step, back into society. The film comes to life by the tensions created between the camera-eye perspective and the gradual return of the girl’s voice. “Red Rubber Boots” (2000) attempts to trace the results of the war within a normal slow-moving everyday scene, which does, however, involve the spectator all the more closely. The camera follows a woman and her two children on their search for the woman’s missing husband, who had been abducted in 1992 by the Serbian army. A government commission scrutinises well-hidden and not easily accessible mass graves, yet the man’s remains are not found.
Jamila Zbanic was born in 1974 in Sarajevo, where she continues to live today.