Exhibition "BOSNIA: UKRAINE Reporting from the future" in Sarajevo

The works of Ukrainian journalists who investigated the processes that came after the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina were presented.

photo: Ahmed Avdagić

The multimedia exhibition of Ukrainian artists created in Sarajevo through the WARM Foundation “BOSNIA: UKRAINE Reporting from the Future” was opened last night at the European House of Culture and National Minorities in Sarajevo. The exhibition consists of a collection of films and essays, media reports, photographs, poetry, works of contemporary art and children’s drawings, and the curators of the exhibition are Slaven Tolj and Lejla Hodžić.

The multimedia works were created in April when twenty journalists, photographers and artists from Ukraine stayed in Sarajevo, Prijedor, Trnopolje, Srebrenica and Žepa organized by the WARM Foundation. They investigated how a country, almost thirty years after the end of the war, faces the processes that come during and after the conflicts stop – the processes of dealing with the past, reconciliation, memorialization, documenting and processing war crimes, the return of refugees, and dealing with corruption. They had the task of reporting on what awaits their country in the future.

photo: Lejla Hodžić and Slaven Tolj, exhibition curators

“Slaven and I helped the artists to solve their doubts and everything else in order to complete their works to the end. One part of the exhibition, marked in yellow, presents the works of 18 Ukrainian artists. Some are in written form, some in video format or photos,” said Hodžić at the opening of the exhibition.

Hodžić added that the works of Croatian and Bosnian artists were also exhibited and pointed out that contemporary art from the war directly inspired some of the exhibited works.

The opening of the exhibition was attended by several artists from Ukraine whose works are exhibited in the European House of Culture and National Minorities in Sarajevo. One of them is journalist Serhiy Morgunov, who said in his address that this was a very difficult experience for him. In April, he stayed in Žepa, where he researched stories about Ukrainian soldiers during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

“I was in Switzerland, Japan and Srebrenica, in eastern Bosnia. Then I returned to Ukraine and started working on these photos and videos, and that’s when I realized how painful it is,” said Morgunov.

photo: Serhiy Morgunov and Iryna Kupchynska, artists from Ukraine

The writer Iryna Kupchynska addressed the audience and thanked everyone for the support that artists receive during the war in Ukraine and said that through this project everyone learned how much war can affect life. During her stay in Sarajevo, she wrote a poem.

“For me, and for all of us, it was so important to see that there will be life after the war,” she said.

photo: Detail from the opening of the exhibition

“The best way for them to see these possible similarities, to learn from our mistakes, is to come here, to see with their own eyes. We have organized a journey into reporting from the future. They come to Sarajevo and try on our broken glass – both real and metaphysical – to possibly see a reflection of themselves in 25 years on various issues,” Damir Šagolj, director of the WARM Foundation, said earlier in an interview for Mediacentar .

photo: Damir Šagolj, director of the WARM Foundation

The exhibition is realized in partnership with the ERSTE Foundation, and will be open to the public until July 13.

In addition to the exhibition, three films were shown yesterday as part of the WARM Festival at the Meeting Point Cinema. The Reporters Without Borders film “Fixers in Wartime, the Invisible Reporters”, which talks about the role of fixers in war conflicts, and the audience also had the opportunity to watch documentaries about Israel during the war: “Israel’s Reel Extremism”, by Inigo Gilmore and Karim Shah, and a film about Israel’s attack on Gaza, KILL ZONE: INSIDE GAZA, directed and produced by Venessa Bowles.

Today, on the fifth day of the festival, a discussion on identity during the conflict in Ukraine and beyond “Jus in Bello” with David Rieff and Andrei Kurkov will be held at China Meeting Point from 3 p.m.