War map

Sarajevo ninety-two

October 10 – November 15, 2025

Umjetnička galerija Bosne i Hercegovine

What is happening in Gaza, and reflected through art, speaks the same language that Sarajevo’s artists spoke in 1992 – a language that transcends divisions, a language that does not seek permission from politics, but communicates directly with human ethical and aesthetic sensibility.

The struggle for the preservation of human dignity does not have to be exclusively political or military – it can and must be cultural, spiritual, and aesthetic. This exhibition, as our contribution to the Gaza Biennale, confirms precisely this: that art remains one of the last refuges of universal values, and that in a world filled with divisions, the shared artistic struggle is an expression of the deepest human solidarity.

“It is not common although it did occur from time to time (the case of Goya is exemplary) that a chronicle be written by means of paintings and images.

Chronicles as a literary genre were mainly in the domain of words and narrative time forms: the primary purpose of paintings and drawings was to illustrate the event enunciated through words. The reason for this, among else, lay in the fact that the distance and “lapse” between words and things was greater than the distance and “lapse” between images and things. (…)

The very title of these graphic art chronicles [Sarajevo ‘92, Sarajevo ‘93, Sarajevo ‘94] suggests a distinction of their particularity and their claim as to graphic art. We are speaking here of marks distinguishing time and place: the place is Sarajevo, while the time is chronological time (1992, 1993, 1994) which places the prints within the order of succession and consecutiveness. However, this order of succession and consecutiveness is only and illusion, since all these three years the collections refer to – with an aim to delineate and to express them – are the years selfsame events and situations of a besieged city. Exactly because of this (although they are a graphic chronicle in a large sense) they are neither a documentary testimony nor an external description of space and of events within that space, but: they are rather an inner pictorial expression of time stopped, time recurring and reduplicating itself – during each one of these three years of siege – in almost identical forms of affective substance: destruction, terror and agony but also resistance, protest and hope.”

Sadudin Musabegović (from foreword Sarajevo ‘92, Sarajevo ‘93, Sarajevo ‘94)

“As we know, painters use a universal language: their messages move easily across national and political borders. In a multi-national community, this universal language has a special cultural mission: to neutralize ideological myths and national prejudices. It is true that all cultural creations bear the marks of their origin and spiritual source, but they serve the same aim and a common ideal of beauty. Hence, the language of art, as an eminently cultural creation, establishes links of spiritual communication even where political measures interrupt them. Sarajevo’s internationally renowned graphic artists, united by their common tragedy in their besieged city, provide an example of this universal language of resistance and hope. Their work, the expression of their spiritual and moral protest against division, violence and the spirit of intolerance, confirms in the best possible way how noble ideas find and aesthetically adequate expression in the universal language of art. In this way, art testifies that a human being cannot be reduced to history, but the human essence is an integral part of the order of beauty and its spontaneous currents.

The Sarajevo Ninety-two collection was born at the crossroads of struggle and creation – two principles which determine the rhythm of life and postpone the blind march of destiny. Freedom and beauty are the motors of this dynamic and its final aims. The Sarajevo artists – remaining faithful to their personal signature and evoking aggression, the darkening of the mind, the monster’s trail, the demonic wave-wished, with their personal revolt, to mark the paths to freedom while retaining symbols of beauty. Herein lies the meaning of their enterprise and the meaning of their achievement. Finally, through their collective effort they confirm that the idea of togetherness in a multinational community rests upon the consciousness of a continuity, interaction and free mutual harmonization of spiritual values. This is a pledge of their moral engagement and a condition of their moral engagement and a condition of their artistic mission.”

Nikola Kovač (foreword Sarajevo ’92)