The international symposium (in English and Bosnian) took place in the Information Center of the Moderna galerija Ljubljana. It consisted of two autonomous yet interrelated parts: the first, entitled Political Theory and War in Bosnia, focused on questions of current political theory; the second, entitled Art and War in Bosnia, dealt with issues related to contemporary art. The participants kept largely to their respective areas of expertise in the discussions, while the organizers – Institute of Philosophy, Research Centre of the Slovene Academy of Sciences and Arts, and Moderna galerija Ljubljana – endeavored to establish communication between political theorists on the one hand and artists and art historians on the other. The dual structure of the symposium reflected a long-term project started in 1994 on the initiative of a group of Slovene and Bosnian artists, with the goal of establishing a museum of contemporary art in Sarajevo. As work on the project started, it became clear that a thorough understanding of the war in Bosnia was indispensable, as well as reflection on the artists’ standpoint on the war. This realization triggered a process of collaboration between the project initiators and a group of political theorists, who were themselves surprised by the vagueness of the position the intellectuals assumed vis-à-vis the genocide in Bosnia. The outcome of this collaboration was the international symposium.
Participants:
Marina Abramović (Amsterdam), Dunja Blažević (Sarajevo/Paris), David Elliott (Oxford), Jürgen Harten (Düsseldorf), IRWIN (Ljubljana), Ademir Kenović (Sarajevo), Alexandre Melo (Lisbon), Viktor Misiano (Moscow), Edin Numailkadic (Sarajevo), Peter Weibel (Graz) Igor Zabel (Ljubljana), Denys Zacharopoulos (Bignan), John Dunn (King's College, University of Cambridge, London), Pierre Hassner (CERI, Paris), Tarik Haverić (Sarajevo/Paris), István Hont (King's College, University of Cambridge), Livio Hughes (University of Westminster, London), Tonči Kuzmanić (Ljubljana), Tomaž Mastnak (Ljubljana), Silva Mežnaric (Univerza u Zagrebu, Univerza v Ljubljani, Zagreba/Ljubljana), Nenad Miščević (Univerza v Mariboru/Rijeka), Ferid Muhić (Skopje), Žarko Puhovski (Univerza u Zagrebu), Edin Šarčević (Universität Leipzig/Sarajevo)
In the fall of that year, Moderna galerija Ljubljana staged the exhibition For the Museum of Contemporary Art Sarajevo 2000, between 24 September and 1 December 1996, which featured works by 10 renowned international contemporary artists who donated their works to the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art Sarajevo. Moderna galerija Ljubljana published a reader that included the papers delivered at the symposium.
