Exhibition Section Texts

By Marina Paulenka

 

1.
Conceived in 2003 as a public project, Bosnian Girl gained viral recognition despite predating the social media platforms we rely on today. First presented on July 11, 2003, to mark the anniversary of the Srebrenica genocide, Bosnian Girl has since become an iconic image of the post-war era in the former Yugoslavia (Ex-YU) and a symbol of a post-Cold War Europe navigating its path toward integration.

The work features Kamerić’s own face, overlaid with misogynistic graffiti written by a Dutch UN peacekeeper in Srebrenica—a phrase that has come to symbolize both the physical violence of war and the enduring prejudices that continue to shape societies across time and space.

The juxtaposition of Kamerić’s vulnerable yet defiant portrait with the hateful message underscores the intersection of personal trauma and public violence. By using her own image, she transforms the personal into the political, symbolizing how women’s bodies have been scarred by conflict, subjected to violence, and reduced to symbols in an ongoing, unrelenting discourse of exploitation, marginalization, and systemic erasure.

In EX YOU, Kamerić revisits Bosnian Girl through a new medium—a short video documentary within the exhibition space, which will also be shared on social media and featured as part of the museum’s merchandise collection. In this new form, Bosnian Girl serves as a powerful re-examination of how Kamerić’s work has consistently confronted and deconstructed the trauma of violence. EX YOU extends this conversation, placing Bosnian Girl within a broader dialogue about the resilience, reclamation, and transformation of women’s bodies.

 

2.

A ribbon tied in submission. A face erased from a story. A body reclaimed beyond the gaze. Each of these marks an expectation, a role assigned before the wearer even speaks. Šejla Kamerić’s installations We Come With a Bow (2018), BAGGAGE (Lullaby for Natalija P.) (2025), and photo Digital Nude (2001) unravel the silent inheritance of femininity—how it is adorned, carried, and controlled across generations.

We Come With a Bow exposes the insidious nature of symbolic violence. The tiny bow sewn onto underwear is more than mere decoration—it marks ownership, an unspoken contract that commodifies the female body from birth.

This burden of expectation continues in BAGGAGE (Lullaby for Natalija P.), where hotel luggage trolleys, gleaming with gold, carry the weight of imposed identities. Photographs sourced from stock imagery—a baby girl in a princess dress, a young girl stepping into heels, a bride clutching a bouquet—map out a woman’s life before she can claim it for herself. Yet, the images betray their own perfection; something is missing, erased by cutout holes. These voids ask questions: Who was here before? Who will be next?

Photo from the series Digital Nude (2001) disrupts the very foundation of these inherited roles by reclaiming the female form from a history of objectification. Created long before today’s hyper-digitized landscape of filtered perfection and AI-fabricated intimacy, this work remains radical in its assertion of autonomy. The digital nude—stripped of pretense—stands in contrast to the traditional nude, rewriting the ways in which women can be seen, on their own terms. In an age where the female body is endlessly manipulated, surveilled, and exploited online, Digital Nude remains a defiant act of self-representation.

Together, these three works form a narrative. A bow at birth. Baggage carried across generations. A body reclaimed, at last.

 

3.

Šejla Kamerić’s new body of work, the triptych series EX YOU, unravels identity shaped by memory, historical narratives, and the weight of expectation. Across photography, installation, sound and light, she constructs a fragmented archive—one that defies fixed definitions, embracing fluidity and transition. Through absence and intense presence, EX YOU interrogates inheritance, erasure, and the struggle for autonomy, insisting on a space for self-definition. The sound installation in EX YOU is a compilation of selected audio works from 1999 to the present, weaving a sonic narrative of consecutive counting, singing, reciting.


In EX YOU PORTRAIT (2025), Kamerić relinquishes her fixed image. This striking triptych merges herself, her mother, and her daughter—three generations of women—into transitional images where history dissolves into skin. Identity is shaped as much by absence as by presence, and the portraits shift between familiarity and disappearance. Blurring individuality, the work challenges the permanence of identity, revealing it as a fluid, constantly evolving construct.

If the face is a palimpsest, the body is an archive of care and sacrifice. EX YOU BODY (2025) explores physicality and intimacy through a deeply personal collaboration between the artist and her daughter, Ela Rosa. In this triptych, the negotiation between visibility and concealment, presence and self-erasure unfolds, with Ela Rosa’s hidden presence actively shaping how her mother’s body is seen, altered, and obscured. Together, they engage in digital manipulations—erasing, fragmenting, reshaping, and redrawing the images—to examine the emotional toll of caregiving, the burdens passed down through generations, and the spaces where women are often expected to disappear.

The tension between visibility and representation pulses through SHE EX YOU (2025), a triptych that echoes Kamerić’s earlier work Digital Nude (2001) while questioning the power structures embedded in the gaze. Once again, her daughter takes the photographs. In SHE EX YOU, Kamerić reclaims the female form, transforming the body from an object of the gaze into a vessel of histories—a narrative in itself.

Identity can be seen, touched, and carried, but it can also be written. EX YOU TXT MESSAGES (2025) transforms language into territory and time. The three manuscripts—written by Kamerić herself, her mother, and her daughter—all born in the same place but under different nations that defined their birth, reveal identity as a shifting construct. As the only one actually born in Yugoslavia, Kamerić situates herself within this evolving political landscape. The messages are not final statements—they breathe, disappear, and reappear. A singular narrative is denied, leaving an unspoken presence that remains.

EX YOU is not a closed archive but an unfinished action, a space where identity is continuously rewritten—not imposed, but reclaimed.

 

4.

The exhibition EX YOU brings together a compelling constellation of old and new works by Šejla Kamerić. The new presentation in Fotografiska delves into the complex relationships between the body and freedom. 

Self-portrait UNKNOWN (2019) exposes the emotional and physical toll of an unpredictable ailment. The image was taken during an episode of idiopathic angioedema—a life-threatening condition marked by sudden, uncontrollable swelling.

This work engages with how appearance and gender are shaped by both internal and external forces, turning beauty into a stressful, enigmatic experience. Kamerić confronts the frailty of the body but also its resilience, revealing how beauty and pain are inextricably linked.

Small sculpture FCK BOW (2025), subverts the traditionally feminine symbol of the ribbon bow. Etched with the repetitive phrase “FCK FCK FCK FCK…,” the polished metal object stands in direct opposition to societal norms that demand women remain delicate, compliant, and ornamental.

In OH MOTHER! OH FATHER!, Kamerić’s photographs of blood-stained hands—positioned like open palms in a prayerful gesture—confront the visceral realities of birth, menstruation, physical violence, and the emotional burdens carried by the female body. The blood signifies both pain and power, evoking emotions often silenced or marginalized in the context of womanhood. In their duality, these images question the meaning of dowry and what is passed down to women.

FREI STAMP (2004) transforms Kamerić’s fleeting public intervention into a lasting statement. Originally stamped onto the skin of club-goers during a 2004 event at the famed Berlin nightclubs, the word FREI (free) served as a temporary mark of liberation. The cast metal version now solidifies this concept, transforming it from an ephemeral act into a lasting object, inviting reflection on the weight of freedom and the marks—both visible and unseen—that shape identity. Freedom here is not absolute but a negotiation, inscribed onto the body in ways that linger beyond the moment.