Falsches Bild

2012

Spatial video installation: two carousel slide projector, text and photography.

If after the formation of concentration camps in the 1990s in Bosnia we received, as Campbell claims, “an icon of contemporary atrocity” and if the numerous iconic photos representing the previous atrocities of the long 20th century constituted the “icons of past atrocities”, could we imagine what “an icon for the future” would look like? An image functioning as a monument that does not work retroactively? Could we imagine an image that would remind us that the future can be fought for and negotiated so that the past icons would not become future ones, but instead a real Falsches Bild? What image could we imagine so that Falsches Bild would represent something that will not happen because it should not happen and would work pro-actively?

Falsches Bild intertwines three images. First showing an image of the inmate forced to run across the filed for the reporters in 1992 in Omarska concentration camp. The second image shows a spontaneous reenactment by the survivors of the camp, who in 2012, 20 years after, recreated the event.

The text on the wall is an analysis of the media images we watched in 1992 and the footage of the re-enactment 20 years later.  Another image is juxtaposed with the text and the slide projection – a test image, a bar image, decomposing. In the time of analogue TV sets, a test image had the status of a non-image. The “real” image came after it.

The Museum and Galleries of Ljubljana, Slovenia 2018 (group exhibition Exhibit A, curated by Alenka Trebušak)

Museum for contemporary art Metelkova, Ljubljana, Slovenia, 2015 (curated by Bojana Piškur)

Deeply thankful to the working group Četri Lica Omarske, who inspired the project in one of their gatherings entitled Video arhiva Četiri lica Omarske in Belgrade, 2012.

Photo of the installation by Robert Balen.