Milomir Kovačević Strašni
Culture in Wartime
Sarajevo 1992–1995

National Gallery of Bosnia and Herzegovina

5 May – 23 May 2026

Opening: 5 May 2026 at 20:00

The photography exhibition Milomir Kovačević Strašni: Culture in Wartime – Sarajevo 1992–1995 will open on 5 May 2026 at 20:00 at the National Gallery of Bosnia and Herzegovina, where it will remain on view until 23 May 2026.

This exhibition presents a selection from the remarkable and extensive photographic archive of Milomir Kovačević, constituting one of the most important visual testimonies of life in besieged Sarajevo. The focus is on cultural production in wartime conditions—artistic practices, events, and encounters that emerged despite everyday violence, destruction, and isolation.

In the text “Milomir Kovačević and the Siege of Sarajevo,” Semezdin Mehmedinović emphasizes that the siege of Sarajevo represented “a different kind of warfare,” in which the “constant suffering of nameless civilians” became the dominant image of the city. In such circumstances, he notes, a strong need arose to preserve normality and human dignity, resulting in an intense cultural life: “the need of artists and writers to describe their reality through creation grew significantly already in the first year of the siege.” Mehmedinović underlines that cultural activities played a crucial role in the city’s survival and in shaping its international perception, while Kovačević’s photographic work remains a lasting record of that experience: “the entire history of the siege survives through his photographs.”

A related perspective is offered by Ferida Duraković in her text “Culture in Besieged Sarajevo,” where she highlights the dual nature of wartime experience: “There was war. It was terrible. And it was wonderful,” pointing to the simultaneous presence of destruction and creative energy. Culture and art, in her words, became a means of resistance and a way of preserving humanity: “During the war we created and showed the world our literary, musical, visual, film, theatre, and multimedia works so that we would not, anonymous and unrecognized, torn apart by shells or shot by snipers from the hills, end this one and only life on the streets of a besieged, strange city lying at the crossroads of four great religions of the world—what a blessing and what a curse of fate!” Duraković also recalls the intensity of Sarajevo’s cultural life during the siege, noting that thousands of artistic events, performances, exhibitions, and books were produced under extremely modest conditions, as an expression of the need to survive and leave a trace.

The exhibition Culture in Wartime: Sarajevo 1992–1995 documents precisely this dimension of the siege through Milomir Kovačević’s lens—the daily effort to sustain the continuity of cultural life and preserve the city’s identity. The photographs testify to art as a space of resistance, solidarity, and memory, as well as its role in the struggle against forgetting.