09 Oct 2010

Röda Sten presents Sejla Kameric

SEJLA KAMERIC
NO MORE DRAMA

October 9 – November 21, 2010

Röda Sten is proud to present its third large scale production of the year, No More Drama – the first solo exhibition in Sweden of internationally acclaimed Bosnian artist, Sejla Kameric.

Kameric belongs to the generation of youngsters that grew up in Sarajevo during the three and half year siege of the city, where boundaries between life and death had collapsed and violent ruptures had become the norm. Issues of individual and collective memory, where traces of war but also bits and pieces of personal history and remembrance mix up, are crucial to Kameric’s work.

The large, site-specific installation created for “The Cathedral” space at Röda Sten consists of two new works: Hooked (2010), a number of gigantic spider-web-like, handmade crochets; and Silken Rope (2010), a 26 meter long embroidered noose.

The works function as analogies to the ancient myth of the woman-artist-weaver, Philomela, who was raped and mutilated by Tereus. In the same way as Philomela used weaving to testify her story, Kameric also uses knitting and embroidery with a twist. But the works also refer to real events, and are born from an obsession the artist developed during the years of the siege. This obsession was shared by many Bosnian women at the time – a kind of doodling with the hook and the thread. In her works, Kameric subverts the cozy delicacy of the traditional craft by enlarging the size of the doilies to unprecedented extremes. Oversized in proportions, the crochets not only imitate life forms – gigantic spider webs – but they acquire an uneasy feeling of menace, which is perpetuated and enhanced even further in the embroidery of the gigantic, double-sided noose in Silken Rope, dangling from the high ceiling like a sacred punishment descended from the skies. Embodying a collective experience, while addressing us in person, Kameric recovers the silenced testimony of innumerable stories about men’s cruelty and prejudice towards Bosnian women, who used weaving as a means to mentally resist the double threat of the war – that of being killed and that of being raped and impregnated by the men waging the war.

A similar stance is adopted also in previous works by Kameric. Most remarkably in her axiomatic poster series Bosnian Girl, where racist, misogynist graffiti (left by Dutch soldiers supposed to be in charge of protecting civilians in Srebrenica) is placed upon a seductive self-portrait of the artist, alluding to the female body as political object and subject of violence, abuse and exchange.

Graffiti is used again in her series of late, Nigel U Go, where decorative doilies are forcefully estranged and elevated into artifacts by the act of framing, while undergoing the violent intervention of the scribbling of names “George,” “Silvio,” “Nicolas,” etc – all powerful men of our times, who are involved in playing a mad game with the fate of humanity, imitating old gods of the past and their games with the humans.

In Hooked and Silken Rope the act of knitting is seen symbolically as a way of overcoming the submission and also as a form of resistance. This leads us towards the gender aspects of the piece, not by the mere critique of knitting as a traditionally female craft, but rather by referring to the many untold stories of real women sitting behind the needle and the shuttle. In Kameric’s own words: “Hooked started as a need to create something that has a purpose. As the net grew, purpose became an obsession. Being hooked is being liberated and enslaved at the same time.”

No More Drama consists of the following works by Sejla Kameric: 
Dream House (2002), Glück (2010), Hooked (2010), Nigel U Go (2010), Remains (2006), Silken Rope (2010), Sorrow (2005), Sunset (2008), and What Do I Know (2007).

The exhibition is curated by Edi Muka.