BERLIN, GERMANY.-On the occasion of the Berlinale 2008, the Artists-in-Berlin Program, as usual, presents the work of an artist whose main medium is film or video. This year, the Bosnian-Herzegovinian artist Šejla Kamerić will show her film What do I know (2007). After having been shown as a film on the Venice Film Festival 2007, where it received widespread attention, the work will now be exhibited in the daadgalerie as a four-piece projection, effectively making it a video-installation. The claustrophobia suggested by the spatial presentation will echo a central filmic theme; that is, film as providing a physically sensible structure of space.
“Kamerić’s most recent work, the 15-minute short film and the 23-minute four-part film installation based on it, What Do I Know, deals with another distant past, the time when her grandparents were still young. The setting is the house of her grandfather in Sarajevo , who ran a café on the ground floor and lived upstairs from it. In the now vacant building, it seems as though time has stood still: furniture, wall paper, dishes and other household items all breathe the spirit of the 1950s. With close-up shots and slow camera pans accompanied by piano music through the abandoned rooms, the house becomes a still-life of itself. Children appear in between, dressed in historical costumes of adults at the time. There are brief allusions to three different interlocking love stories with unhappy or fatal ends.”
Šejla Kamerić was born in 1976, in Sarajevo , Bosnia - Herzegovina and is already considered one of the country’s most successful artistic ambassadors. She has had solo exhibitions in Japan , Austria and Germany and has taken part in numerous group shows all over the globe. In 2005, she was invited to the 51st International Short Film Festival Oberhausen and a year later showed her work on the 15th Biennale of Sydney . In 2007, her film What Do I Know was selected for 64th Mostra Internazionale D’Arte Cinematografica in Venice . Kamerić has been member of the European Cultural Parliament since 2002. She lives and works in Sarajevo and Berlin.
