On the occasion of commemorating the 30th anniversary of the genocide in Srebrenica, a large exhibition of Safeta Zeca – Tears and Prayer will be opened on July 3 in Sarajevo City Hall.
Safet Zec’s work reminds us that tragedies are not statistics but real lives. There are no symbols or slogans in his paintings, only bodies, gestures and traces left by absence. That’s how Safet Zec’s new big exhibition could be described, which will include works from several of his most famous cycles: Tears, Prayer, Exodus and Hugs.
“I’ve been living for years in that need, actually, and the awareness that we all have to – we live moments when we all have to, in fact, make a contribution in that scale, that’s what I said, good and bad because the devil will take us all. We have powerful technologies, man is powerful, but he loses his kindness, he loses his humanity,” says Zec.
The exhibition will not seek pity but an understanding of what happened – and an awareness of what is still happening elsewhere.
“I was carried like this during the flight in 1943. Therefore, if it is not universal – now they carry it in Gaza, they carry it in Ukraine – I believe that I possess that strength and quality that the whole world understands”, continues Zec.
This is not the first exhibition dedicated to Srebrenica. But perhaps it is the most direct. While the witnesses of the past retreat into silence, and interpretations increasingly obscure the facts, the exhibition Tears and Prayers reminds us: art can – and must – remain at the service of memory. Without pathos, headlines and noise. Only the view that remains. That is the face of truth.
