March 07, 2020

Photographer's exhibition guarded by police and private security

topic:	Arts
located:	Bosnia and Herzegovina, USA
editor:	Katarina Panić

Famous American photojournalist Ron Haviv`s exhibition Liberty is dedicated to prisoners of war in Bosnia in the early nineties.

"The title suits both to pictures and to our efforts to speak about the past freely", Edin Ramulić from the Prijedor-based Foundation for Building the Culture of Memory, Foundation X said to FairPlanet.

Last month the famous photographer came to the site of several notorious prison camps he pictured in 1992. It was Saturday afternoon. A few dozen people gathered in a hotel on the river Sana bank.

"It was my job to tell the world what was happening here. I have documented emotional trauma. I hope that the next generation can understand the mistakes their parents made and then go down to a different path in the future", the author said at the opening ceremony in Prijedor.

Public spaces such as museums or galleries are still not entirely ready for facing past themes. At least not for the crimes committed by the same ethnic group, which currently represents the majority in a particular area. Not even if the pictures cover all sides - Serbs, Bosniaks and Croats.

"If we ask for public space, the authorities never say it is not allowed because of the theme. They always have some other excuse. And after all these years there is no doubt they made them up. It simply can not be a coincidence", Goran Zorić, a local human rights activist told FairPlanet.

That is why the organisers, Foundation X, Youth Center Kvart and the German peace organisation Forum Ziviler Friedensdienst rented the space for a few days in a private-owned hotel.

"We have to deal with the past not because of the past but because of the future. These photographs are important because they raise the question of how these atrocities were possible, and how to build the future where everyone enjoys the freedom and where no one can take the freedom from anyone anymore", Judith Brand from Forum ZFD said.

The author himself came to town guarded both by local police and by a private company additionally. "Mossad is somewhere around too?", one of the spectators commented on the presence of security staff.

Haviv used to be threatened by far-rightists previously. His pictures were used as evidence before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in five different trials.

"It is true that public spaces are hardly approachable for such content. However, there were no negative comments nor hate speech about the exhibition at all. It is a great deal of progress, you'd agree. And I assure you this very same exhibition is going to be set up later this year in one of the public spaces too", Ramulić concluded.

Image: Ron Haviv, 1992

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