Artists come through for Bosnian museum but it’s still a no-go
Print Edition
IT’S hard finding a bright side to the museum scene in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo, where the Olympic Museum burned down during a 1992-95 siege by Serbian forces and the main national museum closed in 2012 for lack of funds.
But thanks to a grant from the Italian government and a plan by Italian coffeemaker Illycaffe to sell designer coffee cups to support the project, there is hope for one man’s vision of creating a modern art museum for a city still suffering the aftershocks of the ethnic conflict of the 1990s.
“That night when the museum was burned down, a spontaneous idea emerged as a reaction to all those religious and ethnic divisions,” said Enver Hadziomerspahic, who directed the 1984 Sarajevo Winter Olympics opening and closing ceremonies.
The idea was “to invite world artists to form a collection of their own future museum of contemporary art which would become a symbol of a new Europe and an expression of international collective will,” he said.
Hadziomerspahic lobbied European museums and galleries to take part in the project even while the war still raged in Bosnia. Museums in Milan, Prato and Venice — all in Italy — and Ljubljana and Vienna became partners, and world-renowned artists donated works estimated to be worth 20 million euros (US$27 million).
Twenty-two years on, the collection of about 150 works is still homeless because of political bickering in the Balkan country, where rival ethnic elites cannot agree on any nationwide cultural project.
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