Wednesday 3 September 2014

Exhibition Celebrates the Reopening of Sarajevo’s Library - The Damnation of Memory - Do Not Forget, Remember and Warn!



Sarajevo's Library/Miriam Nabarro
I came across the work of the wonderful Miriam Nabarro while doing a piece on War Correspondents for the Economist's Prospero blog, a song theatre show on foreign correspondents. Nabarro, who has worked in conflict zones for many years, designed the show and helped interview the correspondents.

Looking at her website, I was amazed at the scope of her work (theatre design, photography, printmaking and textiles) at a still relatively young age. Her work has taken her to Iran, Australia, Sudan, Kosova, Eritrea and the DRC, where she has created performances, exhibitions and installations in theatres, football pitches, churches and factories, with national theatres, artists, street children and people of all ages.

I was excited when she mentioned her new project: The Damnation of Memory - Do Not Forget, Remember and Warn!, an exhibition celebrating the reopening of Sarajevo’s iconic war-bombed library. For the show, Nabarro experimented printing square, black-and-white images she shot with her old Hasselblad camera onto glass with liquid emulsion to create a fragile, ghostlike feeling.  She produced nine dreamy plates, which seem to whisper stories of 'before', of the library's savage destruction, but also of resilience and hope.

I love them, so was disappointed when a piece I wrote for the Times about her exhibition failed to feature her work because the editor believed the black-and-white images would not reproduce well.

As there are only a few days left to view this beautiful, evocative exhibition, I wanted to show some her images here, along with the unedited piece I wrote for the Times. The Damnation of Memory - Do Not Forget, Remember and Warn!, is showing at the School of Oriental and African Studies  (SOAS) in London until September 5.  Go see it, if you have a chance.
Sarajevo's Library/Miriam Nabarro
 
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The Damnation of Memory - Do Not Forget, Remember and Warn! – An exhibition celebrating the reopening of Sarajevo’s iconic war-bombed library.
A plaque at the entrance of Vijećnica, Sarajevo’s recently reopened iconic war-bombed national library, reads:

'On this place.... Serbian criminals in the Night of 25-26th August 1992 set on fire the National and University's Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Over 2 Millions of Books, Periodicals and Documents Vanished in the Flames
                  Do Not Forget, Remember and Warn!'

The destruction of Vijećnica was one of the most devastating acts of the 1992 Bosnian Serb siege of Sarajevo and became its symbol.  Nearly 90 per cent of the library’s collections vanished in black smoke, which hung over the city for three days. “Set free from the stacks, characters wandered the streets, mingling with passers-by and the souls of dead soldiers,” wrote the Bosnian poet Goran Simic in his 1993 Lament for Vijecnica.

The Damnation of Memory - Do Not Forget, Remember and Warn!, an exhibition of photographs celebrating the reopening of Sarajevo’s library after 22 years, is showing at the School of Oriental and African Studies  (SOAS) in London until September 5.  Vijecnica was restored to mark the centenary of WW1, which was triggered by the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand. He was shot as he left the building, which was at the time City Hall.

“Anyone you mention the library to has a story,” says Miriam Nabarro, the first Artist in Residence in the Department of Development Studies at SOAS, who photographed the library under reconstruction in 2006 and again in 2012.  She was told stories about the time “before”, about the library’s multicultural atmosphere and its magical books; stories about their destruction and how Sarajevans formed a human chain to try to save as many books as possible; and stories about Vedran Smailovic, who played  his cello for 22 days in the burned down library in defiance of the snipers and shelling. 

Nabarro, a theatre designer and photographer, first shot a series of images on a Leica camera in 2006, but they seemed too “journalistic” to reflect the depth of emotions and stories the building evoked. 
Sarajevo's Library/Miriam Nabarro
“Walking through the partially restored shell of the building, you could still see the charcoaled marks of burnt books on the stucco walls, bits of carved graffiti post catastrophe asking for Mir (Peace) and favorite quotes and authors.”

Nabarro wanted her work to respond to the building and its history rather than merely recording its reconstruction, so she returned to Sarajevo in 2012, this time with her Hasselblad, an old-fashioned medium format film camera.  (She had used the same camera to shoot Hidden Corners, her behind-the-scene photographs of the National Theatre in 2010).   She then experimented printing the Hasselblad square, black-and-white images onto glass with liquid emulsion to create a fragile, ghostlike feeling.  

“I work this process very quickly, coating the glass with a gelatin solution, then melting the emulsion in the darkroom, applying it wet to the glass plate, exposing it immediately and then straight into the developer/ stop/fix. It has taken a while to perfect the technique, or rather, to learn about its eccentricities enough to manage the outcomes... but somehow this felt like the perfect medium to evoke the feeling of loss and memory, and also of hope that the architecture of the library gives.”   

To enhance the dreaminess of the plates and let the viewer’s mind wander between the library’s past and future, she suspended her work from the wall by mild steel rods. This allows the light in behind the images and causes them to appear as if they are floating.

The result is a sensitive, evocative and very moving exhibition. There are only nine plates, as well as a beautiful handmade book, but they leave a deep impression. And they seem to echo destruction and hope in other places and times.

The Damnation of Memory is at the Wolfson Gallery in School of Oriental and African Studies  (SOAS) University Library until September 5. 

Sarajevo's Library/Miriam Nabarro