Šejla Kamerić on Art as Resistance

by Ennis Ćehić

Šejla Kamerić’s artistic practice is bold, political and deeply personal. She questions humanity’s destructive behaviour and sees art as an act of resistance. Ennis Ćehić spent time getting to know Šejla, understanding her artistic practice, what it means to be a survivor of war and the role of women’s rights, identity and sustainability in her work.

‘No teeth…? A mustache…? Smell like shit…? Bosnian Girl!’
These words are inscribed on a black-and-white fashion photograph of a young, dark-haired woman inside the Museum of Contemporary Art (MSU) in Zagreb. From its prime position on the ground floor, measuring approximately six meters in height, the image constantly reappears to visitors across the multiple levels of the museum. The brutal, unavoidable directness of the words scrawled over the young woman seeks to be memorized: an open wound, seared into our collective memory of a moment from Bosnia & Herzegovina’s history, not to be forgotten.

The scrawl was written by an unknown Dutch soldier on the walls of the military barracks in Potočari, Srebrenica in 1995, alongside many other pieces of crude graffiti. In July of that year, the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR), to which the soldier belonged, failed to protect the designated ‘safe zone’ of Potočari, leading it to be overrun by the Serb army of Republika Srpska, who then systematically massacred over 8,000 of the town’s Muslim men and boys. This failure led to the worst European genocide since WWII – and this poster became a visual reminder of the tragedy.

Bosnian Girl, as the artwork became known, is the work of artist Šejla Kamerić.
Devised as a street poster campaign, it first appeared splattered across the streets of her hometown Sarajevo in 2003 – a year before The Hague officially ruled the massacre in Srebrenica a genocide. Its bold aesthetic, political directness and simplicity made Bosnian Girl an instant icon of the Balkans, while simultaneously catapulting Šejla into international stardom. Today, Šejla lives and works between Sarajevo, Berlin and the coastal Croatian region of Istria. She exhibits widely across the world and her works are in permanent collections of Tate Modern, Musée d’Art Moderne de la ville de Paris, MACBA in Barcelona, and preeminent museums across Europe, from Rotterdam across Vienna to Istanbul.
In approaching to interview Šejla, I realised that I had always considered Bosnia & Herzegovina to be a land of poets, writers and musicians – the Nobel Prize winner Ivo Andrić, his contemporary Meša Selimović, or the composer and musician Goran Bregović. The umjetniks i.e. artists of the country hadn’t had the same recognition. But with Bosnian Girl and her wider array of works, including EU/Others (2000), Basics (2001), 1395 Days without Red (2010), Šejla has become an exception – Bosnia & Herzegovina’s foremost contemporary artist….