BOI12

BOI12, 2012. Installation: soil, burlap sack, 111 sheets of A4 paper

Created for the exhibition Jord ll (Soil ll) which dealt with soil as one of the fundamental elements in nature and society, the installation BOI12 was built up around a burlap sack filled with 70 kilograms of soil from the Tomašica mass grave near the artist’s hometown of Prijedor in northwest Bosnia and Herzegovina. The artwork can be understood as a modern contextualisation of the Akedah, or The Binding of Isaac – the significant moment in the religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, in which Abraham ac​qui​esced to God’s command to sacrifice his son Isaac. The 70 kg of soil corresponds to the possible weight of Isaac before the sacrificial ritual.

The wall behind the burlap sack was covered with A4 printouts of documents from court proceedings at UN’s International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, reporting the war crimes that took place in Prijedor during the war in the 1990’s. The document sheets were heavily over-typed with the sentence from the Old Testament: ”And God said to Abraham, slay me a son” in the three official languages in Bosnia and Herzegovina – Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian, representing the three ethnicities that were in conflict during the war. 

The main idea behind this artwork is to put a light on the relationship between personal guilt and the indisputable voice of authority. Its references to the war in Yugoslavia address the question of willingness to kill one’s flesh and blood in the context of our recent history – in the context of a country that experienced ethnic cleansing despite its ideological slogan of ‘brotherhood and unity’, indicating that all citizens no matter their ethnic or religious identification have equal rights and should live in togetherness like brothers and sisters.