The siege of Sarajevo lasted 1,425 days. "Being under siege" meant accepting the fact that the former way of living has disappeared and that the abnormal is becoming normal. Over time, the citizens of Sarajevo discovered methods of survival through innovations and creations, repurposing objects that were available to them, surviving despite permanent terror and destruction. Continuing a normal life, creating even in limited circumstances, for all citizens of Sarajevo under siege was as important as water, bread or medicine. Artists create in impossible conditions. Their mental and existential need to create overcame fear and the sense of powerlessness. The creation of "something from nothing" becomes a great challenge, but these impossible conditions, in a city that is collapsing, awaken the creative power of resistance.

Installing the Cyclist

“We had a painter’s ladder. And when we lit the statue of the bicyclist, and the flyer, and the jumper on fire, which was wrapped in paper. I got this mass, mass of napalm, which we spread over the paper to make it flare up better. And my colleagues who helped me. They actually were the ones who lifted the ladder, the bicyclist, the fire. Fire and water were united and that, that air. Three, strange worlds. While we still remained in this one, in our own world.” - Enes Sivac, Sculptor

Destruction

Sarajevo under siege also defended itself with a culture of living and thus contributed to mental survival. Groups and individuals create and work in impossible conditions, without electricity, without water, with limited movement. With their works and inventions, they create what will later be called a form of spiritual and cultural resistance. The works of art created during the siege are created on the ruins and ashes of a city and save a world from complete destruction. These works become a kind of memory for the future, establishing a culture of living, a new normality.

The reincarnation of burnt buildings

“Since I didn't have any painting supplies whatsoever, I was forced to look everywhere: buildings, ruins, and institutions that had been important during times of peace, and which had completely lost their status during the war. You see, an artist has this drive that forces him to create, to work, to confirm the time and space in which he lives, and of course himself in relation to that. And so I found my materials in destroyed buildings, in institutions such as the Museum of the XIVth Olympic Games, the Oslobođenje newspaper building, private houses, the Oriental Institute, St. Joseph's Church, and I was even forced in some places to peel wallpaper or posters in order to make collages. Then I found some charred beams, and some fiberglass insulation material, and I applied them to pieces of hardboard that I would try to find among the charred remains of buildings in Sarajevo.” - Affan Ramić, Painter

Mapping of the Siege of Sarajevo

Centaurs - During the siege, during the "One Round for Sarajevo" campaign, some European cities sold public transport tickets for the reconstruction fund of Sarajevo's public transport. As part of the presentation of that action, a sculpture of Centaurs in battle was presented in Sarajevo, placed on a destroyed tram that was shelled. It was planned that this sculpture-tram moves on tram tracks. However, UNPROFOR could not guarantee the safety of that installation while driving, so they moved it to a safer place, after one premier round of driving around the city.
Created by: Alma Suljević, Sculptor (In memoriam 1963-2024)

Adaptation

Survival becomes the basic need of every individual during the siege of the city. The citizens of Sarajevo are learning new skills and acquiring new knowledge. Artists find ways to create in a city that is crumbling and threatening to disappear. They adapt to new living and working conditions. By continuing to create, they protected themselves and others from extreme mental stress under constant shelling and sniper fire. With their creations and inventions, they helped the people of Sarajevo to survive both mentally and existentially.

Building the Centaurus

„Actually, just about the whole summer I was working on the idea. I was meeting with people who had crossed over from Grbavica to our side and when we asked them what it was that angered the chetniks the most, they said it was the trams. Man, and at that moment I thought: God, if only I could take a tram and drive it. I was thinking about how it would feel to be a tram driver in that deserted city, where there’s not even a dog on the streets. And I don’t even know how to ride a bike. Thanks to some of my friends’ connections, and probably thanks to the fact that they trusted me just as I was then, I was given that tram that burned up over by the Presidency on the 18th of May, when the President was kidnapped in Lukavica. You remember that it stayed there untouched until ‘94, when they cleared off all the tracks in Sarajevo. Although the grass was growing and those weeds were growing about the tracks, it was a pure piece of art, and passing over that bridge where there were few passers-by, somehow I looked at that streetcar with desire. They generously gave it to me. They said, 'here, choose whichever one you want'. And because it was technically, the easiest for me to make a sculpture out of, I still decided upon that one. We made use of the first day on the UNPROFOR trucks they had rotational welding machines and hoists, so we lifted the tram with those trucks.“ - Alma Suljević, Sculptor

Cultural Survival

When in 1994 FAMA printed its first newsletter, no one „from the outside“ could believe that the news from Sarajevo was: cultural survival. And then they realized that people were organizing exhibitions, performances, giving concerts, making fashion collections – as a way of defeating the fear of death. Culture is a basic need, as well as bread and water.

Survival Art Museum ’94 – ‘All I need is Love’ exhibition (author: Amra Zulfikarpašić) - © FAMA Collection - Visual Archives 1992-1996 (Drago Resner)

Advice for Survival

“We prepared a kind of message from Sarajevo to the world, to the outside world. We created a little work of art through postcards. Postcard after postcard, message after message, which we wanted to send to the outside world using symbols known throughout the world such as Coca-Cola, Hollywood, man on the moon, Marilyn Monroe, symbols that can be easily communicated to the world. And we put these symbols into a Sarajevan context. We wanted to send the messages to our friends. There were about thirty or forty messages that we created one after the other over a period of seven days. And then we held an exhibition for the tenth anniversary of the Sarajevo Olympics. That show consisted of those 40 messages, presented as big posters. It was a lot of trouble to make those posters because there were no more, I don’t know, tempera paints. We had to get them from some kids, since we were already more than a year into the war. It was terribly cold at the Collegium Artisticum, where we did all of the work. We even wrote a little note on the postcards showing that they were printed under wartime conditions. We wrote: No electricity, no water, and no gas. Just good will. It was kind of like our document that was also a piece of art. In addition, the preparations for printing out a small series of let’s say 100 copies sometimes lasted for two or three months. Sometimes we had to trade cigarettes for paper, or buy something in return for paint, and then have to wait for there to be water so that the printers could clean the presses, set them up, and so on. You constantly had the impression that five or six people were risking their lives just in order to print a set of postcards that you wanted to be a record of that moment. The opening was on the tenth anniversary of the Sarajevo Olympics. About one hundred people gathered there. They had to risk crossing the bridge to Skenderija. We constructed a big installation made out of empty Coca-Cola crates, which were supposed to remind people of our message, ‘Enjoy Sarajevo’. Which expressed the idea that however you look at it, we still enjoy Sarajevo, our city.” - Bojan Hadžihalilović, Designer

To be an artist is to believe in life.

- Henry Moore

Survival Art Museum ’94 – ‘All I need is Love’ exhibition (author: Mustafa Skopljak) - © FAMA Collection - Visual Archives 1992-1996 (Drago Resner)

Going out of Sarajevo

“Sometime in June 1994, as part of the project Witnesses of Existence, I came out of Sarajevo for the first time, went to Biel a small town near Bern. That was the first time I got out. I went with about five artists and the organizers of the exhibition. It was a shock. To get out of Sarajevo, besieged, shelled and are in a town where normal, peaceful life was going on, where people walked about the streets after nine o’clock, quite ordinarily. It was a bit of a shock, a bit unforgettable. But like a curse on us Sarajevans, as I had hardly been able to wait to get out of Sarajevo so I could hardly wait to get back. I shall never forget that exhibition in Switzerland. A woman came, a rich Swiss woman in a fur coat. Prosperous looking, well groomed, you could see she was rich. She looked at our exhibition and we laughing and joking and all at once she began to cry. The crying of that woman made me realize the full force of what was happening to us. I’d never thought about it. Looking at her as if she were me, like I might before the war have visited an exhibition showing some terrible catastrophe that had taken place. Looking at the dreadful and moving pictures of it, of course I would cry. But as a witness of it here was me laughing and she, as a visitor felt the full drama and began to cry. It was then that I became aware of what was happening to us in Sarajevo.” - Edo Numankadić, Painter

Recycling

The citizens of Sarajevo realized that they had to create an alternative way of life in order to survive. One of the important aspects of this new way of life was the repurposing of objects in order to replace everything that was not available during the siege. Improvisation, invention and recycling became survival tools. Materials from destroyed buildings and houses, pieces of burned trams and buses - remnants of old lives - became materials used by artists in their creative work in a city under siege.

"Centaurs fighting"

„The easiest way to deal with that destroyed tram was to turn it into a sculpture. To start off with, we used the rotary welding machines and cranes that UNPROFOR had on trucks to lift the tram.“ - Alma Suljević, Sculptor

The new normal

The siege of Sarajevo showed that a person can survive a disaster and remain a human being. Sarajevo chose culture as its weapon of defence against terror. Citizens walked the streets under the impact of grenades and snipers to perform their daily tasks of survival, play sports, go to concerts, theatre plays and exhibitions as a way of personal resistance and defence of human civilization. A new normal has set in. One civilization disappeared, and a completely new one was simultaneously established in its wake.

How did you entertain your children?

I organized the children and we made exhibitions, I taught them to paint.

year of birth: 1937
profession: Artist - Painter
gender: Female
city district: Koševsko Brdo

Describe your day and work.

I'm alone, I get up, I make coffee, I go to the Academy to work with students, to meet colleagues and talk about the "Sarajevo '94" graphics. I go to the studio and try to do something before it gets dark. Sometimes I go to a bar, it's a long night, I read, listen to the radio, cook and sometimes I fall asleep.

Can you give us a prescription for mental health?

Love and work.

- Salim Obralić, Painter

Describe your day and work.

Morning coffee with friends; working with students if there is no shelling; in the afternoon I paint or work on sculptures when there is electricity; in the evening I wander with friends if I find them; I sleep in the long and dark Sarajevo nights, listening to the shooting from the hills.

- Mustafa Skopljak, Painter

Perception

The need to establish some kind of balance in the midst of chaos arose spontaneously. In order to maintain mental health, every citizen of the besieged Sarajevo tried to keep himself in balance by bringing his old way of life to the now changed conditions.

Then...

Advice for Survival

“Work was a kind of mental exercise for all of us or perhaps a means of mentally resisting. And it was interesting how during the war, if you ran into five people and asked them what they were doing, you would find that each of those five people was working on some kind of project of their own. This was because no one was able to give you or find you a job. You had to think up some kind of job for yourself. I worked a lot during the war, and that pretty much saved my life. Jobs that are perhaps less important now, when looking at them from a different point of view. At that time during the war, they seemed to me as if they were the most important thing in the world, even more important than my own life. And so I was going out to make trademarks for people, to design their projects, because that was terribly important to me. And I never thought about the possibility of something happening to me because of someone else’s project, like the possibility of my getting killed, for example. And this was at a time when there wasn’t any electricity at all, there wasn’t anything. There was no water, there wasn’t anything. This made work difficult for designers, because every one of my jobs depended on electricity in order to be realized in the end. And that was always the most difficult phase during the war. During ‘92 and ‘93 I became a regular nomad trying to find places where I could plug in my computer. Literally every month I had to move with my machines, my computers from basements, to cafe booths, to headquarters, and everywhere I had to plead to people to let me sit down somewhere and work. To give me just a little bit of electricity so that I could hook up my computer.” - Amra Zulfikarpašić, Designer

Now...

Design, way of survival

“Before the war, Sarajevo had a very strong art scene. Before the war, Sarajevo had the Collegium Artisticum, which was the largest gallery in the territory of the former Yugoslavia, and thank God it still exists today. Sarajevo had the largest exhibition that took place on the territory of Yugoslavia, and that was the ‘Yugoslavian documents’. So we entered this war with a fantastic background. Many artists left Sarajevo, some stayed, but even those who left were tied to Sarajevo, almost like with an umbilical cord. They held exhibitions abroad that were about Sarajevo, some held exhibitions in Sarajevo as well, some came, some sent their works. Basically, the art scene in Sarajevo, as well as the theatre and music scene, was very lively. We were working every day. Our base was the Academy of Fine Arts and the Collegium Artisticum. During the war, I had a couple of joint exhibitions, but I also had one solo exhibition that I did on the topic ‘Design, Way of Survival’. Because before the war, I did the exhibition ‘Design, Way of Life’. It was held in Skenderija. One of my friends helped me and the two of us found a small space in the Skenderija building, in the Youth Centre building. There was nothing there, everything was bare. And all the windows were broken. There were none. There was a small room in the middle and the director of Skenderija gave us permission to work there. I was lying on the floor without clothes, only in my underwear, and my friend Sanela outlined my body on the foil that was usually placed on windows. At that moment, the door opened and one French soldier entered, followed by another and a third, because they were working to secure Skenderija. We chased them out, they left completely shocked, since they did not expect that when they opened a door, they would find such a scene behind that door. Basically, the exhibition was successful like all exhibitions in Sarajevo at that time. It was extremely well attended, regardless of the fact that there was no electricity and that my son held the wire plugged into the outlet all night.“ - Amra Zulfikarpašić, Designer