On the occasion of the 29th anniversary of the Srebrenica genocide, Gallery 11/07/95 is this year focusing on a photograph depicting the hand of a woman at the moment she is giving blood for DNA identification of her murdered family members.The photograph, taken in 2003 in Blagovac at the Identification Center, serves as a lens through which we wish to reflect on how we remember the past, understand the present, and plan the future.
Living in a world of 24-hour media reports on suffering, in a predominantly visual era that desensitizes us with an overload of information while voyeuristically profiling us, we want to pose the question of the power of art and culture, particularly photography, to fully convey the reality to which it refers.
The medium of photography allows us to see things that happened in the past and to relive them. It enables the past to haunt us repeatedly, seeking answers we do not have and that continually elude us, compressing the past, present, and future into one transhistorical point.
The drop of blood on the hand of a mother giving blood for the identification of her children is a call to participate not only in remembering the victims of genocide and empathizing with the survivors but also in the search for Life that was brutally extinguished in July 1995 in Srebrenica, and for the life that is being stifled today in other parts of the world.
The drop of blood on the mother’s hand reminds us of the unspeakable trauma of genocide while simultaneously inviting us to take on the trauma of Srebrenica as our own, for in Srebrenica, not only were the lives of its people extinguished, but the very essence of humanity was also extinguished.
Believing in art and culture as agents of rehumanization of humanity, and in the necessary equivalence of ethical and aesthetic origins, Gallery 11/07/95 continually strives through its work to present the theme of the Srebrenica genocide as a historical and civilizational punctum to which we must constantly return.
