Aida Šehović: Returning Home

Curator: Irfan Hošić

Partner: Kuma International, Sarajevo

What is home, and how to understand it when its physical location has been destroyed, erased or forgotten? This is the initial question artist Aida Šehović asks with Returning Home, her first solo exhibition in her home country of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The exhibition is based on the personal refugee experience of the artist from the 1990s and includes migration experiences and challenges that the city of Bihać faces today. In doing so, the overlap of the personal with the collective grows into a social play within which the performativity of displacement and the pursuit of a “home” explores relationships with the different cultural backgrounds of the globalized world today. Articulating a view specifically from the Bihać position—as a city on the border with the European Union, which in the last few years has turned into a difficult-to-control hub for the movement of people on the so-called Balkan route—this exhibition considers the issue of belonging within a historical and spatial perspective, and using the practices of visual culture (drawing, video, design) and tools of social practice, imagines the possible reimagining of the home of “uprooted” and displaced people. Aida Šehović creates a platform for a personal story, but also for the story of others who are marginalized, disenfranchised and humiliated. As such, the exhibition is a kind of “safe space” for mutual understanding and empathy.

The exhibition consists of two methodologically and medially different units. The first is a video installation Apartment from 2021, which shows how the artist’s parents reconstruct the memory related to the physical concept of home through mental recollection exercises. The second is a series of workshops with “people on the move” who voluntarily, using a drawing, tell the story of the home they left or the home they aspire to.

Apartment is a two-channel video document of the process of evoking memories and remembering the “past life” of a family whose members have experienced forced migration, more precisely being a refugee. The intonation and metrics of the work are shrouded in a sense of nostalgia and melancholy. The work also talks about the “invisible” consequences of ethnic expulsion, about personal memories and social upheavals in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which the artist describes as “very serious wounds which for us do never go away, but are only deeply suppressed.”

As a parallel, the exhibition also includes intensive workshops titled “Drawing towards Home” with people on the move who are currently in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the region of Bihać due to rigid migration politics and strict border regimes of the EU. 

The exhibition is funded by the Foundation for Arts Initiatives and the Emergency Grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts in New York. The workshops are conducted with the help of Save the Children and SOS Bihać.

Aida Šehović is a Bosnian born artist based in New York City. Šehović is the founder and caretaker of ŠTO TE NEMA—a participatory public monument to the Srebrenica Genocide. Šehović is the recipient of the ArtsLink Award, the Emerging Artist Fellowship from Socrates Sculpture Park, and the Fellowship for Utopian Practice.

KRAK is a collective that focuses on contemporary culture including visual arts, design and social theory. It is participative project with different protagonists who use the tools of social engagement and urban transformation to foster process of learning, informal education and cultural exchange. 

Kuma International Centre for Visual Arts from Post-Conflict Societies is a platform engaged in different educational activities, working closely with scholars and artists. Kuma’s primary focus is the contemporary artistic production from Bosnia and Herzegovina. 

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