KELLY WRITERS HOUSE

Erika Tapp

MOSTAR/SARAJEVO:
MODERNIST RUINS

CURATOR STATEMENT:

poModReDUX

By Peter Schwarz

 
 

The architecture on display is modernist, yet my exhibit commentary is a "post-postmodernist" discourse situating the specificity of Erika Tapp's photography within the conceptual framework of the Balkan Wars. Postmodernism is not a distinct rupture with modernism, but is the last stages of modernism playing itself into its present state of exhaustion. I also implicate postmodernism as an instigating factor in the 1991-1995 Balkan Wars, a cultural "movement" that is contributing to the current cultural fragmentation characteristic of globalization. While this exhibit refers to Yugoslav modernist architecture, engagement on the aesthetic and political levels is approached from postmodernist and "post-postmodernist" perspectives.

During these fragmented Balkan Wars, indicted Serbian war criminal Slobodan Milosevic acted more like a postmodernist warlord than a 20th Century modernist totalitarian like Hitler or Stalin (yes or no, as Western politicians debated then); while some will undoubtedly argue that Milosevic's "Greater Serbia" dream echoed Hitler's lebensraum, thus qualifying him for modernism's category of tyrant, Milosevic's nationalism is a postmodernist discourse: his control and use of mass media to opiatize his subjects while glamorizing his nationalistic "celebrity" image; trumpeting ethnic superiority while simultaneously attempting to create a homogenous and feudalistic society that cannot escape its heterogeneous influences; his reign as a macabre parody of his earlier 20th Century totalitarian predecessors. These are several examples of the intricate modernist-postmodernist dialogues that erupted into a savage war during which, for the first time since 1945, concentration camps (Prijedor, Omarska) appeared on European soil. The previous Balkan Wars are a significant factor symbolizing the need to move beyond postmodernism.

Mostar/Sarajevo: Modernist Ruins presents three voices: the damaged architecture as nonverbal testimony; Erika Tapp's intention to restore Bosnian modernist architecture to our attention while capturing the resilience of life emerging among the ruins as the ongoing project of Bosnian postwar reconstruction continues. (The most evocative image of the second voice is "Trolley ride through Sarajevo", infamously called "sniper's alley" during the war and a thoroughfare that claimed many civilian lives.) The third, curatorial voice completes the process of cultural production by creating a discourse worthy of the works that engages the viewer on the complex levels present in this exhibit.

Mostar/Sarajevo: Modernist Ruins is a collection of visual documents not only of the subjects depicted, preserved as archive, but also as one collective document of an event that reveals the breaking point with postmodernism for what will follow afterwards:

   
Damascus of the West
                            the lineage you bear inscribed

As Carthage,
the sack of Rome and Byzantium to the East where west divides among our bodies—


           does the earth know language

                          does the sky reproach the minaret?
 


Songs cascade through the present centuries, these lyric struggles entombed in mass graves, 

         the Great Schism is a line drawn in the mind 

                        observed by bleached stone markers 

                    engraved

                        with the names of the Holocaust's heirs—
 

Six hundred years and Prince Lazar regains his head, the scattered legions
clamor black birds fly again above Barbarian hordes, Huns or Goths the
plunder is the same voice 
 

       
Ilyrian Latin or Bosnian
 


We did not burn Saint Sava

                  accused heretics plead

                         Turk! Turk!

                                  Zupanis scream

                                       Who is the Turk Obrenovic!
 

Reichstag burns    red flag rises over the Kaiser's broken eagle,

the Imperial Viennese are cross-caste lovers Admira Bosko

                                     who don't reach Trieste

This land is steeped in the blood of stories—
 
 


As old as Celtic memories

burning in the paleolithic night
 

                         King Gavrilo is crowned
 

Howls break the darkness 

                     into trade routes leading through Occident lusts

	                                                 and wine tears
 


Passions play on the road to Calvary's mosques,

salvation smoldering in the eyes of bearded patriarchs anointing their apostles

 

              Incense fogs 

                     the taste of rose water splashing Dalmatian shores—

 
             
The women of Bogomil and their stolen bodies

                thieved from their Magyar lovers into Orthodox harems,

these daughters of Sultan's mistresses seeping rose-petal jam

                                      while bearing Slobo's salty seed

 

 A fief for a piper's

                    song of honey and plums.
 

© Peter Schwarz 2002