Fotograf Magazine

Šejla Kamerić (b. 1976) studied graphic design at the Academy of Fine Arts in Sarajevo. Since that time, a sensibility for the ingenious combination of text and image within an artwork has become deeply rooted in her activity, along with the ability to directly communicate with the viewer which informs her singular approach to photography. The triggering factor, the brutal catalyst for what in her work is a kind of self-healing creative pressure valve, as well a lasting formative influence on her style, can be found in the Balkan history of the 1990s. Growing up under sniper fire during the siege of Sarajevo, which lasted nearly four years, and experiencing the loss of her father as well as the basic assurances of civilization unquestionably contributed to the unmistakeable, unsettling, and paradoxically aesthetically intense approach with which the artist defies the “logic” of this historical predicament. Her public art and photographic installations and video works have since the beginning of the 21st century enriched the visual identity of the newly-forming Bosnian society.

One of the first installations (as yet without the photographic component) to bring the artist international recognition was the site-specific project EU / Others (2000) that she presented at Manifesta III in Ljubljana. In a laconic form of conceptual shorthand she used textual light-boxes to convey the caste system and resultant humiliation of non-EU citizens during border controls. Under the weight of this context, the Ljubljana bridge blocked off by a mere two words became a most scathing metaphor for a volatile political situation. Kamerić expressed her own sense of powerlessness and the need for active participation in current affairs, as well as a desire for justice, in her large-format installation Warrant (2002, 2003). In public spaces in the vicinity of Dubrovnik (and a year later also in Vienna) she hung billboards of an actual but ultimately unrealized SFOR campaign designed to help apprehend the war criminals Ratko Mladić and Radovan Karadžić. Particularly in the Balkan context, this project resonated with a pressing urgency, provoking a number of most emotional reactions. At a time of omnipresent post-war syndrome, the project more than anything posed a number of questions regarding individual and collective guilt, and the nature of punishment, revenge and retribution.

Roughly at the same time – as a Bosnian Muslim – Kamerić also created the long-term project HomeSICK (ongoing, since 2001), placing arrows pointing to Sarajevo across different continents, in large cities as well as smaller towns, paraphrasing the Islamic Quiblah – symbols which show the direction of Mecca. She thus poignantly expressed her love as well as an emotional ambiguity towards situations and places that we miss, although we are unable to live there.

Another essential effort to spread awareness of the suffering of civilians during the recent armed conflict is her photographic campaign entitled Bosnian Girl (2003). By juxtaposing her self-portrait with a disparaging verbal description of Bosnian girls left behind by an anonymous member of the Dutch UNPROFOR corps in an abandoned military barracks in Srebrenica, she created an indictment of the hypocrisy of western civilization, as well as a grim metaphor for the impossibility of intervention in a conflict of unprecedented injustice.

The artist’s micro-intervention Frei (2004) was made for a relatively specific audience at the Festival of Electronic Music held in Berlin’s multi-media club CTM 0.4. Its photographic record, however, was eventually transmitted across the visual arts scene. In this work, she also projected memories of the recent past as well as the boundlessness of the sense of freedom since regained. In addition, in the German context the work referenced the tragic history of that country and the cynical inscriptions over the gates of the concentration camps, or the tattoos which were imposed on their prisoners.

Wartime Sarajevo and the memory of a miserable life lived within a demarcated space continued to spur feverish artistic activities in the years that followed. With the distance of time, allusions to specific events are no longer as clearly visible in her work; it responds rather to the general sense of existential unease experienced within “civilized” society. One may place in this group of works for instance the photographic detail of a wall covered in bullet holes entitled Red (2007), presented in the form of wallpaper in close to actual size, which enables the viewer to retain at least some sense of basic detachment from the underlying chilling the message. The cavities left by bullets and sharp splinters of brick, a familiar sight for anyone who so much as passed through the Balkans in the immediate post-war decade, are mercifully covered in this work by spray-painted graffiti – undeniable proof of the emergence of another, “normal” generation of teenagers. Thus in this respect, Šejla Kamerić radically re-evaluates her bonds to the past. While previously these represented a painful open wound, in her later work she compares them to scars – and though these may be healed and no longer hurt in comparison to the original wound, still one can never be entirely free of them.

After an even longer distance in time, she presented at the Folkestone Triennial, Tales of Time and Space, an extensive series of photographs entitled I Remember I Forgot (2008). The diverse forms of her public art ventures (photo installations, billboards, postcards) at the time literally saturated the streets of this English town. She placed her images in the local police station, the hotel, the ice cream shop – in all those places where the private life of an individual intersects with the public sphere through the specific function of the venue. Her timeless black-and-white images offered the visitors alternative visions of events set in a real-life setting, yet ripped out of their original temporal dimension.

Through the processes of remembering and forgetting, the artist repeatedly seeks to find solutions regarding the meaning of historical as well as personal cataclysms. She interprets the past by searching for various forms of the present day and variations of future events. Her intuitive interlinking of specific people and localities contemplates the role of chance in human life, the folly of the subjective perception of a particular event, and the selective nature of human memory, as a result of which some things are lost to the point of taking on an opposite meaning. This inner resilience, pride and resolve despite all that she has gone through nevertheless prompts a belief that the future has a purpose.

Zdena Kolečková