Press Release – We Come With a Bow

Šejla Kamerić is considered one of the most important artists of her generation in Southeast Europe. 

Known for her highly political work, she has received widespread acclaim for her poignant intimacy and social commentary. Her work takes us to spaces of displacement and discrimination and insists that the delicate and the sublime are not pushed aside by catastrophe or hardship. Rather, they exist simultaneously, revealing a complex, psychogeographic landscape and the tenacity of the human spirit. The sadness and beauty, the hope and pain that emerge, are part of the stories we share. The weight of her themes stand in powerful contrast to her particular aesthetics and choice of delicate materials. 

The exhibition We come with a bow builds on the artist’s body of work, focussing on self-portraits, feminism and gender stereotypes that have always been dominant in her practice. Some of the new works on view are painfully personal, but they always try to reach a collective experience. Included in this exhibition is her monumental self-portrait Embarazada from 2015 which has not yet been shown in Berlin. 

Using art as a means of self-identification is crucial in my practice. Art navigates my understanding of who we are and helps me investigate how society reflects in us as individuals. Some of our identities we choose ourselves, but most are imposed upon us and all of them carry stigma, prejudice and stereotypes. We are all victims and perpetrators of that, accepted, behavior. 

I belong to a group that is the single most oppressed, abused and exploited in human history: women. Who are we? What makes us different? Do we self-identify or are we identified by others? One thing is for certain, we are at the absolute epicenter of modern conflict in the worst possible sense. We are a majority of the victims of war, a vast majority of the victims of sexual abuse, a vast majority of the victims of domestic violence. We are the lowest paid workers and biggest target group for advertising. We do not own but are expected to give. Our biggest strength is seen as a weakness. „The emotional, sexual, and psychological stereotyping of females begins when the doctor says, ‚It’s a girl‘“, but does it ever end? 

By understanding different positions and recognizing complex multiple narratives that lie beneath every identity, we can try to brake from negative patterns of our behavior.

– Šejla Kameric 

In the self-portrait Embarazada (2015), the nine months pregnant artist herself poses nude as the sad clown Pierrot, with a teardrop on her cheek. 

– I show myself, my pregnant body as an object set in the corner of the house as decoration. But all this is just a pose, the space around me is not real, it is mere scenery. The role has been consciously chosen to counteract the imposed order. I’m Pierrot and I’m saying – you do not have to kill me because my character is dead already, but you are as well. 

In a new self-portraits Behind The Scenes I, II (2019), the artist shows images of herself as a teenager for the first time, taken during the siege of Sarajevo. Barely visible words written over the photography are her testimonies. When read, they yield a different explanation than one would imagine. The photographs were taken in 1994 by Hannes M. Schlick for Magazine MODA Italy.

– This photo was taken during the hardest and most brutal part of my life. But the image shows something else. We try to imply deception in which our mind constantly functions. The culture we live in gives us the guidelines – points of understanding or total misunderstanding. I wonder what exactly do we see and what do we want to see from the vastness of images that are being imposed on us on an everyday basis.