Casa della Memoria Institute, Italy, 2023, curator Maria Fratelli

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9.11. / 2002

 

This photographic study has the aim to settle the parallel between tragic events in N.Y. on September 11th, and period of the siege of Sarajevo 1992-1996. This photo series is consisting from triptych portraits of eleven pairs of twins, citizens of Sarajevo, who lived under the siege and survived its hell. Two pairs of twins, didn’t survived the siege complete, and from that is coming the title of this photo study, ´9/11´, which is also initiating the date of the attacks on Twin Towers in New York. All persons are from different confessional, sex and age background.

 

All photographed persons have masks on the faces in three reasons. First is in hommage to the people of New York, because they wear the same on the days after the attack, second is because, today some twins are not looking the same, and with this masks, we are finding the similarities in the eyes, and the last reason as it is its purpose, for protection, which means to stay clean after all the horror that we all passed.

 

Photographs were made in 2002, following the 10th anniversary of the beginning of the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The locations where they were taken are the places with deep significance for me through my three sarajevan life, before, during and after the siege.

 

The exhibition was exposed first time on September 11, 2002 on Fine Arts Academy in Sarajevo and it was opened by the U.S. Ambassador to Bosnia-Herzegovina, H. E. Clifford Bond. After Sarajevo, in April 2003, under patronage of Mission of Bosnia-Herzegovina to the Council of Europe, the photographs were exhibit in the main hall of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, and after in the Museum of Modern and Contemporary arts in Rijeka, followed with exhibitions in Toulouse, Grenoble and Geneva. Photographs from this series were published in the book “Šta Ima?” (L’œil électrique éditions, Guernica A.D.P.E., Toulouse, 2005). In 2009, this study was exposed in the frame of the collective exhibition “Art and Terrorism” (curator Irfan Hošić) in City Gallery of Bihać (Bosnia-Herzegovina). In May 2011, the exhibition was shown in Fresh Claim Photography Gallery in Belfast (Northern Ireland). A year after, on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the siege of Sarajevo, the exhibition as well as the monograph book with the same name, was presented in Centre de la photographie Genève (CPG) - Bâtiment d’art contemporain in Geneva (Switzerland). A day after, monograph was promoted in the frame of “Nuit des images” in Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne (Switzerland). On the invitation of curator Mirjana Dabović, in April 2014, the exhibition was shown in National Museum of Montenegro in Cetinje (Montenegro).

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On the 20th anniversary of September 11 attacks (2001-2021), one of the portraits was exposed in the vitrine of Atelier jv17 in Geneva (Switzerland). The protective mask, that the author put on the faces of those portrayed back in 2002, today during the global pandemic COVID-19, gives to this work a double historical stamp, which at the same time raises many questions about our judgment on the relationship between the individual and the collective.

 

in december 2022 and on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the siege of Sarajevo (1992-2022), this serie was exposed in the gallery space of the Casa della Memoria institute in Milan (photo above) on the invitation of Maria Fratelli, director of the Institute and under the curatorship of the distinguished Italian art historian Martina Corgnati.

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                           Centre de la Photographie, Genève, Switzerland, 2012, curator Joerg Bader

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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                National Museum of Montenegro, Cetinje, Montenegro, 2022, curator Mirjana Dabović