OPEN GROUND
Danilo Krstanović x Andrej Đerković
Historical Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina
Sarajevo, May 12th 2022

This photographic diptich is an amalgam of two photographs from two historical periods of modern society as we know it today - the siege of Sarajevo and the global pandemic COVID-19 disease. The photograph of Danilo Krstanović (1951-2012) in which a woman runs across the crossroad on Skenderija in Sarajevo while she protects the child from snipers in her arms, visually and timelessly blurs in the photograph of Danilo's friend and war colleague Andrej Đerković in which, after almost three decades, completely unconsciously, it is an almost identical scene on the central square of Plainpalais in Geneva.

Two photographs, one in motion, the other static, together unite the open ground, in which each of them has a different meaning and personal reading. Krstanović's photograph shows open ground as danger, while Đerković's, on the other hand, shows open ground as salvation. On first photo, the subject has a desire to escape from the open ground due to deadly sniping, while on the second, this subject has a desire to stay on the open ground as much as possible, away from physical contact with others, due to the deadly COVID-19 virus. The strength of that closed maternal embrace and openness of open ground in both photographs makes the visual construction of these two periods, as well as the construction of your own feeling in that moment where the main goal is to protect what is more important to you at that moment than yourself.

The curator of this exhibition is a girl from the womans arms on Danilo Krstanović’s photo, Tijana Križanović, today History Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina curator.