Šejla Kamerić: WHAT DO I KNOW

6 December, 6pm:
Playing History: On Sejla Kameric’s “What Do I Know?” and other contemporary re-enactments of the past.

A lecture by Anselm Wagner (Graz)

The trauma of borders created by violence, and the trauma of war and persecution characterise the work of the young Bosnian artist Šejla Kamerić. Using photos, videos and actions in public space, she formulates utopian longings and reveals the absurdity of current European policies with their mechanisms of exclusion and foreign control. The lecture will deal with Kamerić’s recent work, the film „What Do I Know?“, a story concerning the lives of her grandfathers and grandmothers played by young girls and boys, and will analyze its means and structure within the framework of contemporary artistic methods of re-enacting of historical events.

Dr. Anselm Wagner is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Architectural Theory, Art History and Culural Studies at the University of Technology in Graz, and he works as an art critic for several magazines in Austria (e.g. “spike”, “Parnass”).

The video installation of Šejla Kamerić leads us into the strange, obscure, ominous, and yet seemingly idyllic world of family memories. Figures once familiar from family photographs are wandering around the artist’s grandparents’ house; threads of various stories interweave and vanish into the past; traces fade and mingle on the paths of remembrance. All characters are children: children grown old in others’ pasts, Lilliputian adults wearing grave faces. Seeing them, the burden of family and social conventions seem even heavier, as if we knew the end of the story from the very beginning.

Directed by: Šejla Kamerić, Timur Makarević

Director of photography: Vladimir Trivić