Survival Map – The Siege of Sarajevo 1992-1996 (© FAMA Collection, 1995/6, www.famacollection.org), courtesy FAMA Collection
Public Lecture by Gabriela Manda Seith
15 May 2025, 18.30
<rotor> Centre for Contemporary Art
Volksgartenstraße 6a
8020 Graz
Surrounded by tanks, mortars, and cannons, the inhabitants of Sarajevo were not deterred from engaging in artistic activities. On the contrary, art became a central part of survival and resistance against the siege of Sarajevo between 1992 and 1996: Artists created works, installed art in the public spaces, and gathered for exhibitions, risking sniper fire every time they stepped outside. This lecture concentrates on the strategies of opacity artists used to navigate the siege, which, due to Sarajevo’s cauldron-like topography, turned the city into a panopticon controlled by the surrounding snipers. How did artists undermine the situation of being seen without being able to see the snipers? How did they break the one-sided power relationship through subversive interventions in the public spaces and defy spatial violence? Addressing these questions, the lecture presents the ways in which artists refused to accept their passive roles as victims, reclaiming Sarajevo through artistic means.
Gabriela Manda Seith is a curator and researcher based in Berlin. In her work, she focuses on the agency of art engaging with issues at the intersection of war, colonialism and ecological crisis, such as in the exhibition “False Clouds” (Sarajevo, 2022), which investigated environmental violence. She has curated exhibitions at the neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst, Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, the Historical Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Goethe-Institut Sarajevo, the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the Neues Museum Nürnberg, among others.