Despite depravations during war, Sarajevans continue enjoying
art
ByRon
Jensen, Stars and Stripes
Ivana Avramovic
/ Stars and Stripes
Mustafa Skopljak created this sculpture during the Bosnian war out of
glass that was shattered during the shelling. The sculptor says he had no
shortage of material. |
Seeking comfort on a cold night during the siege of Sarajevo, Tvrtko
Kulenovic pulled from the shelves of his substantial private
library the hardback edition of the complete works of William
Shakespeare.
Then he stuffed the thick volume of the Bard’s sonnets
and plays into his stove and set it ablaze.
“It did for some time provide heat,” recalls Kulenovic,
director of the National Theater in Sarajevo, the capital
of Bosnia and Herzegovina. He smiled slightly at the memory.
While Bosnian Serb snipers and artillery reduced life in
Sarajevo to a daily battle against cold, hunger and fear for
more than 1,000 days from 1992 to 1995, Sarajevans often turned
to the arts for solace, and not just as fuel for the evening
fire.
Stage productions flourished. Galleries held exhibits, often
displaying new art inspired by the war. Musicians held concerts.
Painters painted and sculptors sculpted even as shells tore
apart the city and sniper bullets mowed down men, women and
children.
And if there was art to enjoy, Kulenovic says the people
of Sarajevo braved the dangers to find it.
“They took the back streets, streets that could not
be seen by the enemy,” he says. “But they did come.”
They sat in cold theaters to watch a ballet or hear chamber
music and visited poorly lit galleries to gaze at paintings
or sculptures or photographs.
“At least for an hour or two, you felt normal. You felt
the world was as it used to be,” says Kulenovic, also
a professor of literature at the University of Sarajevo.
Meliha Husedjinovic, director of the National Gallery, says,
“I think that for survival, [art] was one of the most
important things.”
Ivana
Avramovic / Stars and Stripes
Mustafa Skopljak, an art professor at the Academy of Fine Arts at the University of Sarajevo, paints in
his office. For two years during the war, while he was displaced from his apartment, he slept and
worked in the office. |
For some people, she says, the ability to create or enjoy
art was “more
important than to find bread for the day.”
Soon after the war began in spring 1992, the curtain went
up on the
Sarajevo War Theater.
“It represented a real spiritual refuge,” says
Biljana Vujic, who works with the theater, which is still
active and still known by its original name.
On Sept. 6, 1992, the first production of the new theater
opened, a play called “The Shelter” by Safet Plakalo,
one of the theater’s founders and its current director.
Before the end of the war, the theater’s reputation
had spread. It actually toured Europe in 1994 and 1995 with
“The Shelter.”
Since it began, it has been in continuous production.Vujic
admits that some people think the name should be changed,
but she insists, “We are used to it and recognized by
it.”
As the shells fell, artists found a new inspiration. One
photographer held an exhibition of photographs of the telltale
marks left by exploding shells —
Sarajevo roses, they are called — in streets glistening
with rain. “A wonderful exhibition,” Kulenovic says.
Several artists with similar ideas eventually gained international
attention when their work toured under the title “Sarajevo:
Witnesses to Existence.” They included the war in their
art.
Among them was Mustafa Skopljak, a professor of sculpture
at the University of Sarajevo’s Academy of Fine Arts.
Ivana
Avramovic / Stars and Stripes
The National Gallery in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia
and Herzegovina, presents exhibits from all over the world.
|
“To this destruction of the war, I reacted with construction,”
Skopljak says in his office at the academy, where he lived
and slept for two years when his apartment was destroyed.
His office is decorated with his work. Most eye-catching
are the conical shapes formed from pieces of glass broken
by the Bosnian Serb shells.
People thought him crazy, he says, as he went about gathering
the glass. There was no shortage. Virtually every window in
the city was blown out
during the war.
His art also incorporated the twisted metal, broken bricks
and smashed tiles from shelled buildings.
“I had enough material,” he says a bit sarcastically.
“The shells prepared everything for me.”
He and other artists socialized, he says. They planned and
put on plays and exhibitions and films.
People came, he says, because “ people had had enough
of basements, hiding.”
The performances and exhibitions gave people a chance to
gather and talk. The women even wore makeup and their finest
dresses.
“The question was whether they would be able to go back
home,” he says.
Ivana
Avramovic / Stars and Stripes
The Sarajevo War Theater — Ratni Teatar in the local language — began in 1992 and is still producing plays
more than five years after the end of the civil war. A refuge for actors and theater-goers during the war, the
company has achieved stature around the world.
|
In postwar Sarajevo, art has enjoyed mixed success. For example,
the
Sarajevo Film Festival has gained worldwide recognition and
attracts celebrities from Hollywood each year.
Also, the city will host about 1,000 young artists from around
the globe in late July at the 10th Biennial of the Young Artists
of Europe and the Mediterranean.
But like the rest of the country, the arts suffer from a
lack of money. Many of the artists and performers who left
during the war have not returned.
“They got jobs and didn’t come back,” says
Kulenovic.
Only 18 ballet dancers remain in a troupe that had more than
40 before the war. Of more than 30 actors who worked in the
city before the war, only 16 remain.
“There is no money. There is no prosperity,” says
Kulenovic. “That is the problem. People are not the problem.”
Husedjinovic says many artists have left because there is
no money for them to remain in Sarajevo. The most talented
have accepted scholarships to study abroad, often after their
work attracted attention in the spotlight shown on Sarajevo
by the war.
Skopljak, too, admits that many of the best artists are leaving,
but he doesn’t begrudge their decisions.
“There is no money. It’s hard to sell a sculpture,”
he says. “But we (who stay) still work. I feel bad for
the students who have to leave. I see that they’re successful
outside in the world.”
He jokes that their departure is part of a plan to build
at “Greater Bosnia,” a reference to the plans for
a Greater Serbia that helped fuel the Balkan wars of the 1990s.
The National Gallery is caught in a bureaucratic pickle.
According to the Dayton peace accord that stopped the war,
the local cantons — sort of like
U.S. counties — are in charge of cultural funding.
But the gallery was state-owned in the days of Yugoslavia
and has not completed its move to the private sector. The
gallery now lives on borrowed funds, says Husedjinovic.
“We get means only to maintain the building and minimum
wages,” she says. “We do searches for sponsors.”
Recently, the National Gallery showed the work of a French
artist with the help of the French cultural ministry.
There is hope here that events like the film festival and
others will bring prosperity to art once again in Sarajevo.
But in a country where unemployment is rampant, gallery exhibits
and stage productions might seem unimportant.
Yet this is Sarajevo, where even a war could not stop artists
from creating or people from enjoying the art.
Skopljak recalled a proverb that claims that when cannons
are firing, the muses are silent.
“In Sarajevo,” he says, “the muses were not
silent.”
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