![Sample our Arts journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110799/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Arts.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
This paper considers art works made by the author over a gap of twenty years in response to the siege of Sarajevo (1992–1996). The first works were inspired by the then BBC War Correspondent, Martin Bell in his radio broadcast of 1996 in which he reflected on the tragedy of the Bosnian War. The second group of works were made as part of the AHRC funded project Art & Reconciliation and were the result of visiting Sarajevo for the first time in 2018. For this the author drew upon his experience of using collections and archives as source material, here drawing from the collection of the Museum of History in Sarajevo where the final exhibition was staged. The author reflects on the role of the artist in tackling issues of conflict when not an eyewitness and draws parallels with examples such as Michael Tippet’s oratorio A Child of Our Time and Bob Dylan’s The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll. The paper also considers how knitting can be used to construct a form of alternative memorial and how his own personal experiences and memories can form the foundations for new work.
Acknowledgements
This is a contribution to the AHRC funded project Art and Reconciliation: Conflict, Culture and Community between King’s College, London School of Economics and London College of Communication (University of the Arts London).
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Professor Paul Coldwell is an artist and researcher whose practice includes prints, book works, sculptures and installations, often working from collections and archives. He has exhibited widely, his work held in numerous public collections, including Tate, Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A), British Museum, Arts Council of England and the Musee d’art et d’histoire, Geneva and selected for many international Biennials including Cracow, Ljubljana, Split and Warsaw. Recent solo exhibitions include A Layered Practice 2013, Studio 3 Gallery, University of Kent, Re-Imagining Scott 2014, Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge and Material Things 2015, Gallery II, The University of Bradford. He curated Digital Responses, V&A, Morandi’s Legacy; Influences on British Art, Estorick Collection, London, and most recently The Artist’s Folio, Cartwright Hall, Bradford (2014), published Printmaking: A Contemporary Perspective (Black Dog Publishers, 2010) and contributes to a number of publications including Art in Print, and Print Quarterly where he is on the editorial board. In 2011 he chaired the jury for Imprint International Graphic Art Triennial in Warsaw and has been Keynote Speaker at Impact 7 International Printmaking Conference, Melbourne 2011 and SNAP 3, Germany 2015. In 2015 he was awarded an Arts Council grant to develop new work for exhibitions at the Freud Museums in Vienna and London and is currently working towards a show of new work at the Sir John Soane’s Museum (2019).
Notes
1 The paper develops ideas expressed in the author’s keynote address for the conference Ruins, Remains, and Reconstructions in Sarajevo 27–29th June 2018.
2 ReConciliations was shown at The Museum of History, Sarajevo 27/06/18–31/08/18, The Exchange, Bush House, London 01/11/18–01/12/18 and will be further shown at the Museum of Modern Art, Banja Luka summer 2019 (dates to be confirmed).
3 Why Remember? Ruins, Remains and Reconstructions in Times of War and Its Aftermath, 3-Day Symposium in Sarajevo, Bosnia & Herzegovina, 27–29 June 2018, Hotel Europe, Sarajevo.
4 Setting Memory – Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna, 2016 (Paul Coldwell & Bettina von Zwehl), Temporarily Accessioned-Freud’s Coat Revisited, Freud Museum London (Paul Coldwell). The film-maker Susan Steinberg used this exhibition as a focus for her film The Hope (https://vimeo.com/202936303) which set the exile of Freud against the recent migration crisis.
5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Child_of_Our_Time (referenced 3 September 2018).
6 Re-Imagining Scott: Objects & Journeys, The Polar Museum, Scott Polar Research Institute, 31/05/13–20/07/13.
7 Moss Bros is a gentleman’s outfitters with a long tradition of hiring suits for special occasions such as weddings. I associated the brand with the idea of Sunday best as referenced in Bell’s text.
8 With the Melting of the Snows has been acquired by a number of collections and libraries both in the UK and abroad including New York Public Library, Tate Gallery London and the Imperial War Museum London. It has also featured in the exhibition Catalyst: Contemporary Art and War, IWM North, and in exhibitions in Bradford, Gallery II & Canterbury, Studio 3 Gallery.
9 The skeletal structure of the sculptures was an attempt to suggest that these were linear representations of a solid object: I saw them as drawings in space, the trace of the line leading the eye around the form. Coldwell, P. (2005). Finding Spaces between Shadows. The Camberwell Press, p. 45.
10 Abandoned Landscape and With the Melting of the Snows were first shown at the Eagle Gallery, London in 1998. They have subsequently been shown at Arthouse, Dublin in 1999 and again at Gallery II, Bradford in 2015.
11 ‘From its founding in 1945 until 1993, the Museum remained thematically focused on the history of antifascism during World War II and the cultivation of socialist state values. The name of the Museum, once Museum of the Revolution of Bosnia and Herzegovina, has changed several times, but it has always been recognizable. After being renamed the History Museum in 1993, the thematic structure of the Museum has also changed. Now the aim is to study the history of Bosnia and Herzegovina from the Middle Ages to present times’. From museum website (http://muzej.ba).
12 The photographs were taken by Enric Marti, first on 01/12/93, http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Watchf-AP-I-BIH-APHS461968-Bosnia-Civil-War-Nermin-Divovic/1cb3aaf7a494413fa4d3b1ef43cd61a4/17/0, the later on 18/11/94, http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Associated-Press-International-News-Bosnia-Herzogovina-BOSNIA-SNIPER-ALLEY/4f5a4667fbe6da11af9f0014c2589dfb/13/0
13 I realised in retrospect that the passing on of the story of Nermin was part of the process of constructing an alternative memorial through the aural tradition of exchange.
15 A Sarajevo Rose is a concrete scar caused by a mortar shell's explosion that was later filled with red resin. Mortar rounds landing on concrete create a unique fragmentation pattern that looks almost floral in arrangement. Because Sarajevo was a site of intense urban warfare and suffered thousands of shell explosions during the Siege of Sarajevo, the marked concrete patterns are a unique feature to the city. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarajevo_Rose (accessed 03/09/2018).