We’re Not Like Them, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Rijeka, Croatia, 2019

Curated by: Ksenija Orelj and Sabina Salamon / Photo credits: Damir Žižić

Fragments I

Where stories cut across the land

2015 - 2018

Six channel video installation

Video HD, color, sound

This is not a video work about borders. Rather, it is a video work about overcoming the influence of politics on the land within the borders of unrecognized or semi-recognized states. It is a document of the fragmented symptoms of the “Bosnian pot” character of governance, in which all components simultaneously complement and eliminate each other. This unsettling principle of governance, in which elements unable to withstand the pressure collapse, while those that are more powerful survive (and are subsequently absorbed within the system), has been known for many centuries. By not taking sides, what this work highlights, from a bird’s-eye view, are the contrasts and conflicts provoked by contemporary attempts at preserving a semblance of safety within those borders. Unfortunately, many of these attempts did, and continue to, constitute crimes.

Much more than a mere cinematographic idea, Fragments I is a series of video documents detailing a journey through specific socio-political pulsars: The Republic of Abkhazia, a state of limited recognition; Varosha, a silent town in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, recognized only by Turkey; through the Field of Blackbirds in the Republic of Kosovo, a state of limited recognition; at the edge of the Tskhinvali region of the Republic of South Ossetia, a partially recognized state; in the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic or the Republic of Artsakh, a state unrecognized by any sovereign state; and in Transnistria, or the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic, a self-proclaimed, non-recognized, autonomous territorial unit with a special legal status. [M.Ć.]