“Graphic portfolios Sarajevo 92-95”

Several collections of graphic prints and also of wood engravings were produced during the war by the Academy of Fine Arts in Sarajevo, in cooperation with the International Peace Centre (IPC) and the news agency BH Press. These collections were part of the same project, which started in 1992, and continued for several years in a row.  Artists and students from the Academy of fine Arts in Sarajevo realized graphic prints as individual testimonies of and responses to the siege. The collections were first exhibited in the Academy of Fine Arts. Subsequently, the IPC organized for them to travel to the USA, Austria, Spain, France, Germany, Belgium and other countries, where they were shown in galleries, as an “expression of the resistance and of creative power of artists”, and  to transmit a “message of hope, freedom and tolerance in the struggle of civilization against barbarism”.

In an interview from 2015, Salim Obralić from the Academy of Fine Arts talks about the project and the positive response it received from the very beginning:

“The first graphics portfolio “Sarajevo ‘92” has aroused great interest, both in Sarajevo and in the world. The graphics were exhibited in many places around the world – in Austria, Berlin, Paris, Madrid, Istanbul, Norway, twice in France, etc. Continuing to create new graphic portfolios was a matter of conscience and responsibility. There was simply a need to react in an adequate way to everything that happened in Sarajevo. When we made the first portfolio, of course, we didn’t know that the war would last for four years. So the portfolios were created in the war years from 1992 to 1994, and the last graphics portfolio “Sarajevo ‘95.” was created in the first year of peace. With each year of the war, we did new work.”