The story of the "Sarajevo Memorial" began in 2012 when the Association of Parents of Murdered Children of Besieged Sarajevo started collecting items belonging to children killed during the siege, for the purpose of commemorating the 20th anniversary of the beginning of the siege of Sarajevo. At that time, a significant number of children's toys, drawings, and photographs were presented.
The exhibition was named the Sarajevo Memoir because the structure of a book known as a memoir implies multiple addresses and multiple entries. The idea of this exhibition was to open up certain levels of communication through different layers. The exhibition is composed of authentic objects that families kept in private archives, video works with projections of photographs and portraits of children killed during the siege of Sarajevo. The exhibition is conceived as a space for preserving memories and recollections of life during one of the darkest phases of Sarajevo's history.
"Sarajevo Memorial" takes you through children's thoughts on war, peace, love, hatred, fear, play...
"We fled from Grbavica, and I managed to bring two shirts. One is here as an exhibit, and he was buried in the other. There are some letters he wrote to his grandma and grandpa, who were in Alipašino Polje at the time, and we had no contact with them. But all the exhibits are equally difficult and equally painful for us parents,"
The Sarajevo Memorial exhibition is conceived as a space for preserving memories and recollections of children killed in besieged Sarajevo, and it uses the polyphonic structure of a scrapbook to testify, through fragments of children's thoughts on war, about the lives of children during one of the darkest periods in Sarajevo's history.
Unlike classic museums that tell one central story, Spomenar functions through a series of smaller stories – objects, photographs, and records that often have no obvious connection, but together create an authentic sense of Sarajevo through time.
the result of curatorial work and collaboration with local researchers, collectors, and citizens of Sarajevo. By collecting personal items, photographs, and archival materials, a collection has been formed that authentically portrays the city's life through the eyes of a child.
