Towards Continuity of Loss

Video art selection by Zlatan Filipovic

    •    Nebojsa Seric, Shoba Showel
    •    Damir Niksic, Surrender of the Boogeyman
    •    Zlatan Filipovic, UAE resident
    •    Ervin Babic, Somewhere
    •    Ibro Hasanovic, The name of the film is... I cannot remember the name of the film
    •    Nerina Corbadzic, Passion
    •    Adela Jusic, On Wednesday I can be an Artist
    •    Isak Berbic, The end of history
    •    Sejla Kameric, Dream house
    •    Miodrag Manojlovic, Ordinary

Towards Continuity

In this selection of videos, there is an underlying thinking about loss – an absence of continuity, loss of fragile identity. Whether they are dealing with the present or the past of Bosnia and Herzegovina, they share a “continuity of loss”. Before I illustrate this idea, I should explain its relation to the social and economic conditions of artistic video expression in Bosnia.

Fragmentary support for artistic video expression
Continuity of loss does not just express the artistic meaning of the pieces collected here, but also their conditions of production.  In Bosnia and Herzegovina, support for artistic video expression is sporadic. Movement forward is interrupted in Bosnia. Progression is interrupted by war, by political cataclysm, by poverty, and by the figurative distance from Europe. Institutions are incapable of support and generally face many problems. The Bosnian government has been attempting to pave a handful of kilometers of the Pan-European Corridor 5c highway for years. Cultural institutions struggle to stay afloat with aid from foreign humanitarian organizations. Schools rarely have donors and professors are tightly holding on to their positions. It is difficult to imagine that in a country whose creative potential is praised and glorified by its intellectuals, there is no consistency and care for artistic video production.
As the obstacles extend beyond academia, Bosnian artists find it difficult to feel they participate in global developments when it comes to art theory, practice, and technology. Much of the world is coming together through globalization, yet in Bosnia we feel a distancing. To take a brute condition of production, the bearer of a Bosnian passport has to obtain a visa for most countries in the world. It is not easy to find points of reference when one cannot move to the reference.
Here and there, artists do overcome technical barriers and indulge in experimentation with video. Don Quixote-like individuals charge against the principles and rules of dominating pedagogic and artistic practice, dreaming they can change the way things are seen.  More tragi-comically still, these individuals revolve around the Academy of Fine Arts in Sarajevo. The administration and the majority of professors there neither understand nor support artistic video expression. Sarajevo Center for Contemporary Art and its video production lab pro.ba, performed the role of the platform for media art production, but this, while significant, was also short lived. The artists you see here find their reasons and energy in spite of the general ignorance and refusal around them. They pursue a difficult path of unappreciated engagement. They have to prove the value of what they do and how they do it.
The ways in which these artists utilize the camera and the video medium varies greatly. The reasons are not only due to different artistic sensibilities but also from the absence of continuity of thinking about the medium itself. Hopefully this selection will not only present these works, but also bring them from disparate moments to a coherent dialogue.


Videos in: Continuity of Loss

The opening video of this selection, titled Shovel by Nebojsa Seric Shoba predates the digital era (1997). The video is a document of a performance in which the artist buries his own tool for artistic production. There is a dose of suspense and humor in the confrontation between the character (artist) in front of the camera and the viewers in front of the screen (the camera).
In a world with so many conflicting connotations, everyday life circumstances need only to be recognized in order to engender art. Nerina Corbadzic’s work Passion does just this, observing an insignificant detail and documenting it carefully. She uses the potential of time-based media to modify a visual form.  Using the camera’s technical parameters, her vision reconstructs the initial form of night bugs into a larger, interconnected pattern. A new abstraction appears, layered upon self-destructive events in nature. The bugs don’t know they are engaged in something self-destructive, just as present day Bosnians and Herzegovinians ignore the reality of their environment. A song accompanies the vision:  “All you need is love …”
In Sejla’s Imagine during a visually clean single shot piece of the act of arranging strawberries a voiceover narrator speaks. The voice explains, in an aristocratic tone, the disgust of someone digging through her (the anonymous voice) garbage. A commentary on social divide is apparent and delivered by the very act of removing the stem from the fruit. This invisible barrier is brought forward by misunderstanding, and the inability and unwillingness to put one self in someone else’s shoes. Discomfort lingers in the aftertaste amongst the notes of the piano.
In a world where time is lost, life does not allow pauses. However, sometimes pauses are imposed on us in order to keep us alive. Stuck in bed, Adela Jusic is in pause mode. She cannot produce art, and needs to reflect artistic references that make her feel alive as an artist.
Zlatan Filipovic’s video work UAE resident documents a performance. The performance responded to a careless negation of identity, the sovereignty of the Bosnian and Herzegovinian passport! The restoration process shown in the performance is energetic, yet delicate, and it is full of care. It liberates the form of the passport (one’s identity?) from an imposed and general label.
In other works, the labels are already torn off, fluttering open to interpretation. Damir Nikšić reflects on historical facts and confronts iconic elements: flags, architectural style, “The march on Drina river” (a song-anthem of a radical socio/political movement), Ravel’s Bolero. All these elements relate to periods of foreign rule over BH, in particular Austria-Hungary’s rule during its age of empire and more recent aspirations by others. Standing in present day BH, a figure (Damir Niksic) waves a white flag, reminiscent of surrender. Yet the act’s strength suggests resentment and confrontation too. Both the act and the performance stand in contrast to the site, space and time. The figure creates an imaginary ghost-like-epic out of the artist’s sense of history.
In Isak Berbic’s The End of History a narrative unfolds between two “poet-politicians”, in the form of subtitles. This narrative is interrupted by manipulated documentary footage of the city of Sarajevo during war. The absurd conversation between the red and white subtitles goes from idiotic mumbling to literature, religion and philosophy. The barely perceptible images are near erasure. The images of war, originally sourced from brother’s Kresevljakovic “do you remember Sarajevo”, appear as nostalgic analog video debris.

In Somewhere, Ervin Babic delivers a cunning intimate story. Facing a bird that flew into his apartment, he tries to establish communication. Understanding is so needed in a society where abandoned homes in the center of football fields are ignored and people are cut off from their references.
In Miodrag’s Ordinary, a familiar dictator, in the form of a stop motion animation is re-contextualized by images of him not dictating but rather performing mundane domestic activities.
In The name of the film is … I do not remember the name of the film, Ibro Hasanovic asks his interviewees to elucidate a film they clearly remember but seem to have forgotten. Situated in their homes the characters aimlessly struggle to retrieve missing fragments between moments they remember vividly; moments that have strongly affected them for one reason or another.

As artist and curator of this video selection, I hope to bridge the gap in memory and foster continuity, continuity of surveying artistic video expression from Bosnia and Herzegovina.




Zlatan Filipovic
(edited by Jeremy Bendik-Keymer & Isak Berbic)