Oktober 2010

Asja Hafner (Sarajewo Center for Contemporary Art) presents contemporary video productions from bosnia-herzegowina. 

Wednesday, 27th october 2010, 19 - 21 o'clock in the auditorium of Kunstmuseum Bonn. Free entry!

What has happened in Bosnia and Herzegovina in video art after the war, from 1996 till now 2010?
Even 15 years after the Dayton Peace Accord Bosnia and Herzegovina is in confrontation and facing two problems: the reconstruction of a country devastated by war and the transition between the old and a new system.
Bosnia and Herzegovina seems to be captive of the media in which its virtual parallel life was created during the war through the TV broadcasts, print words and cyber dimension of the internet when poet and writer Semezdin Mehmedinović wrote that reality is more interesting than films.
After the war the return of “normal” life has disciplined art, it has put it in its place. The old or new hierarchy of values and its accompanying criteria are being established again. The spontaneity and improvisation (present in all aspects of life, not only art), creative surviving not just basic surviving, which predominated during the war, give in to the traditional forms of life.
The discontinuity, as the consequence of war, has produced a double break; a break in normal relations with abroad for many years, and break in contemporary artistic currents which animated the cultural scene up to the end of the eighties. In fact, the cultural scene was not only put between parentheses but it is also lost its memory. So, we find ourselves in a situation of tabula rasa, in which the protagonists of the events, who appeared before the war and who in the normal conditions would have served as a reference point in the artistic domain have left the country.  
This discontinuity and losing the memory turned out to be an advantage of the local scene.