By: Clara Bro Uerkvitz, young artist from Scandinavia
“Every man is an artist” –that was what I felt when I visited Sarajevo in May 2012. When I walked in to Ceka Chalarma for the first time, I was in shock. I had never seen anything like it before. I realized how the view of art I picked up in Denmark was much more shaped and formed than I thought it was. To me this was not a gallery. It was messy, no white cube, and people were hanging out. After all it didn’t take me long to discover the beauty of the space. The simple lines of ”everything is equally important” and the term ”kitsch” are ideas I simply love, and I realized that I had missed this energy in Scandinavia.
I went to Sarajevo with my art school from Sweden in May, knowing that I was going to take an entrance exam in Vienna two months after. I was nervous about it and had a lot of different ideas about moving out of Scandinavia. A girl took us to Ars Aevi even though it was closed. Everything was prepared in a way as if the art could talk even packed up as it were in these boxes. The artworks were placed on their depot boxes, or lying on the floor. But it was still very presentable.
I felt really lucky to have seen the exhibition just as it was. While everyone had moved to the second floor, I went down to see the Joseph Beuys piece again. For a long time, I have admired Joseph and have been interested in his theories. This piece was not given to Ars Aevi by Beuys himself, but by his Maecenas wife. They have a strong emotional connection she said, and he had wanted to give this piece to Sarajevo. I was so happy to see this. Right in front of the Beuys piece, there was a room in which a video by Bill Viola was playing. I went in to watch it, and stood at the door opening and watched the dreamy video art. I tried to concentrate while watching, but all of a sudden I thought I saw a shadow of someone walking behind me, and I had a strange feeling that something touched my back. I was a bit shocked and I turned around. There was nobody, everyone else was upstairs, but there was that Beuys piece.
Maybe this sounds weird, but this experience was so strong emotionally that it made me cry for an hour, sitting on the stairs of the Sarajevo Cathedral, while my best friend tried to calm me down. Somehow it became clear to me. It was very important for me to move out of Scandinavia.
I thought these people that I´d met in Sarajevo were warm and I got the feeling as if there was something glowing inside of everybody. Knowledge and experience. Wounds and love. They really had something to tell and to talk about. And this is what every artist should posses. Maybe every man is an artist but not just like that. You still have to do something about it. You have to be passionate and let the glowing thing inside of you boil up, and just really love whatever you are doing. Ghost or not, sometimes you need something else from outside to open your eyes so you can see what you really want, mean, know or are looking for. Well in this case Sarajevo opened something really big for me. I did this performance where I walked through the city observing it with a camera construction. The camera was above my head filming while I was walking. People were looking at me, but really there was no difference between wearing the construction or not. It is very easy to differentiate who is a tourist in Sarajevo and who´s not. So anyways, people will look at you as if you were an alien.
So I wanted to point out these roles, and ask, who is the actual performer?
