Šejla Kamerić: Retrospecting

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Works produced over a span of two decades present resources the artist mobilized from the past to give radical shape to a future she requests, anticipates, and imagines.

Kamerić revisits her iconic piece, EU/Others, first exhibited in 2000 at Manifesta 3. A new, reinterpreted version, EU/ Others – Spin (2022), stands alongside archive works such as Frei (2004) and We were chilling by the pool when the war started (2006). Considering the positionality of her artistic interventions and herself, and subjecting both to non-linear temporal interrogation, the artist presents the urgency of addressing repeating political conditions.

“It is 2022, and we find ourselves in a time of historical loops – with old and new wars reverberating, border regimes producing ‘new’ newcomers, and capital governing the mobility of people and ideas. In RETROSPECTING, Šejla Kamerić reinstates these topics through old and new work, while also reflecting on the vexed relationship between art and the market, which demands constant and new production. The pushback against this anxious demand is the asking of old questions, now heavier with urgency; asking them anew, in their resounding demand.” – states Milica Trakilović, thereby signaling Kamerić’s poignant tracing of a radically different future.

Kamerić’s work Letters from the Frontiers (2022) particularly encapsulates this endeavor and serves as a conclusion of her own otherness and “a revision of the very architecture of power, knowledge, being, gender, and perception” (Tlostanova, 2019).

In concurrence with RETROSPECTING, Kamerić’s Bosnian Girl makes an appearance at The Artothek at the Neue Berliner Kunstverein during their Berlin Art Week exhibition, where visitors will be encouraged to take a poster home with them.

In describing the “essential quality” of Kamerić’s Bosnian Girl, Boris Buden (2021) states that it “takes its political meaning beyond the scope of the so-called struggle for recognition that has become the paradigm of post-modern politics; a politics in which various cultural identities feature as both the main agencies and stakes of political mobilization, while cultural differences provide the fault lines along which today’s major political conflicts unfold.” The works presented in RETROSPECTING reinvigorate this position, reflecting the multitude of media the artist uses in her practice.

With a particular focus on images and text, RETROSPECTING is simultaneously a living archive and an immediate political warning powerfully placed in a particular historical moment. This is also reflected upon in Kamerić’s artworks that are currently on view at the TATE Modern, as part of their permanent collection, and at Manifesta 14.