Šejla Kamerić: an artist’s search for Bosnia’s missing

The stainless steel chamber is dimly lit and cold inside, two metres wide, somewhat more in height and length, reverberating with motor noise: the effect is not unlike being in the back of a van, direction and destination uncertain. Images pass across the wall opposite the door, offering clues. Some show stretches of rural road unfolding, houses glimpsed from a passing ­vehicle. Others, many others, are photographs, names and lists of names: missing persons, lost in the war fought in Bosnia between 1992 and 1995. For some, these roads must have been among the last sights they ever saw.

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The steel box is a mortuary fridge, a purpose-built work commissioned in 2013 from the Bosnian artist Šejla Kamerić for Forensics: The Anatomy of Crime, a new exhibition at Wellcome Collection in London. It contains a server holding 85 hours of video clips. Each visitor’s encounter with the images will be unique, as the clips load randomly from the 30,000 files in the archive. But all of them document Bosnia’s missing people and the search for what became of them.

In the half-light of the Wellcome’s otherwise empty gallery, Kamerić’s reserved demeanour contrasts with the agitated tragedy of her images. She was born in Sarajevo in 1976, the daughter of a doctor and a professional volleyball player, and was living in the city when Bosnian Serb forces and associates began their siege in 1992. “I was a very protected child, having a happy childhood in a family that travelled a lot,” she recalls. “But then, from one big family we lost many members. In the first year of the war, I lost a father and two uncles.”

One of her artworks, made in 2013, is an image of the outside wall of her bedroom, pocked with bullet holes. Another is a film called 1395 Days Without Red, featuring the Spanish actress Maribel Verdú; the title refers to the length of the siege and the need to avoid bright colours that might guide snipers. Not all of Kamerić’s works are rooted in the war — though she finds people assume that they must be. “War didn’t make me an artist,” she says. “The empathy that I have didn’t develop thanks to the war. I had it in me, and it’s a very physical thing: you either have it or you don’t.”

In fact, she knew from an early age that she wanted to be an artist. “I didn’t have any other hobbies,” she says. “I was very, very shy and I’m heavily dyslexic.” Before the war she took a graphic design course while working in a printing house and as a model. She carried on working at the printing house after the siege began, helping to produce official documents including the first Bosnian passports, and even continued modelling — “[It’s] very hard to understand for anyone who wasn’t in Sarajevo then, but life kept on. Trying to maintain ‘normal’ life was a way of resistance.”

Traces of this background are evident in her best-known work, “Bosnian Girl”. Over her own image is superimposed one by photographer Tarik Samarah bearing witness to the aftermath of the 1995 Srebrenica massacres, in which Bosnian Serb forces killed 8,000 men and boys. This shows a graffito scrawled on a wall by a Dutch soldier from the UN Protection Force unit, which failed to protect the town’s population. It reads: “No teeth . . .? A mustache . . .? Smel like shit . . .? Bosnian Girl!” [sic]

Kamerić still has a studio in Sarajevo, though she divides her time between there, Berlin and Croatia. Her husband is also from the city. “We knew that we cannot separate ourselves from Sarajevo and we didn’t want that,” she says. But she is conscious that as a Sarajevan, her experience of war was different from that of people elsewhere in the country. For a long time she was reluctant to visit Srebrenica, feeling that she would be like an “intruder”. When Wellcome Collection commissioned the work, it gave her a compelling reason to make this and other journeys. “I had a list of the places I wanted to visit which I never had enough strength to go to before.”

In the first year of the war, I lost a father and two uncles

Her work started with the records and the remains: the lists; the individual entries like paper gravestones, with dates of birth, disappearance and sometimes exhumation; the pitiful footage of bones; earth-stained clothing and stopped watches. It rapidly expanded, incorporating material such as surveillance satellite images, sequences from war crimes trials and excerpts from the notorious video which emerged in 2005, recording the murder of a group of captive men by Serbian paramilitaries from a unit that called itself the Scorpions. Kamerić contacted the Missing Persons Institute of Bosnia & Herzegovina, the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) and the International Court of Justice in Bosnia. “It just grew from there,” she says. She also became more involved with the missing individuals, humanising the statistics. “We knew that we had to talk to survivors and the families of each missing person,” Kamerić says. Some of her records include personal details, such as hopes for futures that the victims never had.

There was both too much information available and not enough. According to figures produced by researchers working for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), more than 100,000 people were killed in the Bosnian war. A report issued last autumn by the ICMP estimated that 31,500 people were listed as missing. More than 9,000 of them are still unaccounted for, their remains either unrecovered or unidentified. The process has been slowed not only by the concealment of graves but also political disputes over the verification of records: this “shocking” state of affairs, Kamerić says, was the starting point for her project.

Its name, “Ab uno disce omnes”, comes from Virgil in the Aeneid: “From one, learn all.” “I wanted to have a Latin title so it should belong to everyone,” says Kamerić. Latin is also the language of medicine and law, both of which have been applied retrospectively to Bosnia’s missing.

Kamerić herself developed an interest in DNA during her research. “I came to learn that forensic science developed so much thanks to the Bosnian case,” she says. Improved DNA techniques were needed when those available proved inadequate for the mass scale of the task. Besides offering a degree of certainty unattainable by traditional forensic methods, DNA gives investigators an unprecedented ability to reunite bones that have been separated from each other, a particularly grotesque obstacle in Bosnia. Mass murderers dumped bodies in mass graves, where the remains became mingled, and then attempted to conceal what they had done by excavating the graves and dispersing the remains. One individual was identified from remains found in five different graves.

For Kamerić, DNA represents scientific objectivity and the possibility of building agreement about the dead on a basis of fact. “There was no obvious winner in the Bosnian war so there can’t be an agreement based on different ethnic war narratives,” she says. “The only way to move forward is to try to be neutral and scientific about it. The process of finding the missing persons is a step in that direction.”

Her research took her to two mortuaries and the Tomašica mine near Prijedor, one of the largest mass graves in Bosnia, where 275 bodies and 125 body parts were found in September 2013. But these were not the most difficult visits. “Most people think visiting the mortuary is the scariest thing,” she says, “but there are plenty of other situations where you can feel much more the death around you. It is much scarier to be in a society where you know that those who witnessed, who committed crimes are around you.”

I suffered from every single thing that I learnt in the process

Kamerić used her phone to record her video clips. This most personal of devices reminds the viewer that this is an individual’s search, as well as a compilation of data. In some settings the ad hoc quality also enhances the sense that these were images it was risky to gather. One innocuous view of rooftops through a small upstairs window is labelled “Srebrenica” and is set back as though the person filming wanted to avoid being seen from outside. It was recorded in the house of Hajra Ćatić, whose son is one of the 1,000 Srebrenica massacre victims who remain missing.

The image’s uncertainty makes it all the more poignant. What did Kamerić feel after making the journey? “It’s a very active combination between two strong emotions, anger and sadness,” she replies. “I don’t feel hate. I don’t feel anger in that way. I feel angry because the reality that we live in is not right, the truth is not said. We live in a false architecture which is basically saying, ‘All is fine, move on,’ which is wrong. It is completely wrong.”

Kamerić travelled with an assistant, a photographer and a journalist and tried to avoid exposing her team to confrontation. Most of the time, she says, “we were hiding what we were doing. We’ve been followed; we had to lie quite a few times about why we were visiting certain sites.” Yet survivors of ethnic cleansing often still live alongside unpunished killers and silent witnesses. Kamerić has asked them the obvious question: how can they live there? “They say, ‘I don’t live there. I live in my house; I came back to my house.’’’

It was only once Kamerić started travelling that she came to understand the significance of the roads, which she began to film. These were the paths along which refugees fled, along which fighters transported their captives and, later, their victims’ bodies: “When you track these routes, you see how it’s everywhere.” This sense of connection is at the heart of the project. “What I really think I achieved is to show that each case is just one knot in a big web,” Kamerić says. “It’s not about a single experience.” The process also restores something of the history which has faded outside the country, reducing international memory to the siege of the capital and the focus of the largest massacres. “You cannot talk about Sarajevo, Srebrenica if you don’t talk about Prijedor, Višegrad, Foča,” Kamerić insists, naming the scenes of other infamous war crimes.

To bring fresh eyes to the work, Kamerić recruited political science students from the Sarajevo School of Science and Technology — a group too young to remember the war. They also learnt about their own family histories, she says. “Some of them lost members of their family during the war, and that was something they didn’t know much about — that wasn’t a topic in their families.” The material that they uncovered will go online and will remain on Wellcome Collection’s website after the exhibition is over. It is intended to continue as a team effort, sustained by the invisible crowds of the internet — “I look forward to seeing this work in five, 10, 20, 25 years,” she says.

Yet Kamerić still has to shoulder the burden of what she has amassed. “I suffered from every single thing that I learnt in the process,” she says. At the same time, she affirms, “I feel blessed that I did this. I appreciate things better and it made me a better person.” Did she think at any point that she shouldn’t have embarked on this project? “No,” she says, “but I did think, will I ever stop? And now I am quite sure that I will not. It will always be part of who I am.”

Photographs: Tarik Samarah; Maja Daniels; Velija Hasanbegović; ‘Bosnian Girl, 2003’, Public project: posters, billboards, magazine ads, postcards

‘Forensics: The Anatomy of Crime’, an exhibition on the history, science and art of forensic medicine, runs at Wellcome Collection, London from February 26 to June 21; wellcomecollection.org/forensics