“10 Minutes” (2002), a short film directed by Ahmed Imamovic, will be screened at Gallery 11/07/95 tonight. This film seeks to evoke one of the traumatic periods in the history of Sarajevo. On this day, 21 years ago, Sarajevo was attacked and the 1425-day-long siege began. At the same time, this day represents a repetition of history: Sarajevo was attacked on the same date in 1942, and it was liberated by Tito’s Liberation Army on the same date, April 6, 1945. The purpose of Gallery 11/07/95 is to map individual memories of traumatic experiences through art, offering an alternative to the official interpretation of history, which is often distanced from the individual, thus presenting a unique human perspective.
In that sense, the screening of “10 Minutes” is a continuation of artistic and documentary interpretation of important dates; the first step was the opening of Gallery 11/07/95, whose title contains a reminder of one of the traumatic days of the recent war. The short film “10 Minutes” follows two simultaneous stories: one is happening in Sarajevo during the war in 1994, and the other in Rome. The film questions the dimension of time by highlighting how a period of ten minutes can have various meanings. On the one hand, it takes only ten minutes for a tourist to develop a film and print tourist photos of Rome, while in wartime in Sarajevo ten minutes means life and death for a family.
The screening reconstructs the events of wartime Sarajevo through the establishment of simultaneous space and time, combined with the permanent exhibition dedicated to preserving the memory of casualties in Srebrenica in July 1995, seeks to destabilize time and historical linearity, creating a time in which these events, although distant in time, may be simultaneously present.