WOMEN OF THE WAR
Dunja Blazevic

These three artists, who are close in age, remained in Sarajevo during the entire war (Alma Suljevic was even a volunteer in the B&H army). They represent, however, two different artistic periods and two different artistic practices in Bosnia and Herzegovina--the pre-war and the post-war periods.

Alma Suljevic, Weasle

Alma Suljevic completed her studies and began working professionally before the war. Anela Sabic and Suzana Ceric were still students at the Art Academy when the war broke out. They are typical representatives of the war generation of young people, young women whose artistic and personal development and maturation followed a completely different, even "unusual" path and under adverse conditions. This psychological difference, emerging from the conditions to which they were exposed, can be seen in their various forms of artistic behavior, their perception of their surroundings, and their articulation of ideas. That what is common to the work of these three artists is a new awareness of the self and a changed method in comparison to their earlier forms of artistic expression. Even if their work is not explicitly feminine, it clearly implicates a criticism of the ruling male principle and the patriarchal morality.

Alma Suljevic is a sculptor. Her earlier works show a preference for classical sculpture material (iron). She does not, however, consider the sculpture--which she uses as her basic starting point--in an orthodox way and easily steps away from the initial model. And she freely selects and uses "non-artistic" materials, in accordance with the occasion and need. Moving from large-scale iron sculptures of fragile biomorphic forms (painted in red, these can even be read as bloody grass) to original mine-field maps (the kind that are used for deactivating mines), which she places in various positions in individual spaces, she then interferes with them, ritually destroying them by writing her traumatic memories of war over them. The message can read: WARNING!! The killings in Bosnia are not over--there are over three million mines "planted" here, and they kill dozens of people daily and will continue to kill people in the next several generations.

Anela Sabic , Arvo/Tree

Suzana Ceric , Kamen/Stone

Anela Sabic and Suzana Ceric work together. They work with or in a social or spatial context. With their actions, interventions, and installations, they provoke and explore the reactions and behavior of the public or chance passers-by. One of their characteristic actions was their "stroll" along the middle of Tito's street (the main street in Sarajevo) at the beginning of 1997. Traffic was stopped, the police were engaged, and TV cameras were rolling. The meaning of this work is multifold--from the gesture of readopting the city as their own again--to the attitude toward the government and authority and "women's impertinence" at proclaiming nothing as a work of art.

These examples of a new awareness, a new attitude, and the artistic practice of these Sarajevo artists can also be defined as new forms of engaged or activist art (Lucy Lippard), which significantly mark today's art scene in Sarajevo.