Curator: Claudia Zini
An exhibition in collaboration with Steve Bates and Zeenat Nagree
Center for Contemporary Culture KRAK (Hamze Hume bb, Bihać)
June 2nd – 25th 2023
Exhibition opening: Friday, June 2nd 2023, 7 pm

The exhibition Unfolding Elsewheres displays some of the most representative works by artist Velibor Božović. It contains his earlier autobiographical video work My Prisoner (2016), a memory project titled Unfolding Elsewheres (2016-2023) and his latest sound work titled Listening series (2023). A new radio project Radio Elsewheres, produced by the artist in collaboration with writer Zeenat Nagree and artist and musician Steve Bates, will launch and operate from within the exhibition space. Displayed in the city of Bihać, a major transit point for migrants and asylum seekers, the exhibition explores the connection between Bosnian wartime displacement and the current refugee crisis, highlighting the shared history between the two experiences.

The works on display share the artist’s interest in exploring non-linear narratives that bring into focus the complicated process of remembering, retelling and sharing personal stories. Combining elements of fiction and archival footage, My Prisoner addresses a particular event that happened when Božović was serving in the Bosnian army during the siege of Sarajevo – his only meeting with his father who was held as a prisoner of war by the same army.

The memory project Unfolding Elsewheres is composed of a series of photographic prints of firsthand accounts of people’s lives before, during and after the war in the 1990s, collected by Božović and writer Aleksandar Hemon while interviewing members of the Bosnian diaspora. The artist later transcribed and reassembled these conversations by purposely eliminating their syntactic elements, resulting in fragmented texts that open a space for a viewer to explore points of familiarity and strangeness.

The exhibition also features the Listening series, a composition of various audio recordings that echo a fluid assembly of voices telling of lives in transition. The work was born in close correlation to Radio Elsewheres, a program conceptualized specifically for the exhibition that aims to become a space for reflection and dialogue open to artists, musicians, journalists, writers, poets, storytellers and others interested in sharing their projects and experiences around conflict, movement, and migration. Those interested in contributing to Radio Elsewheres, please check the open call at the link.

Velibor Božović grew up in Sarajevo. In 1999 he moved to Montréal, Canada. He earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in Studio Arts at Concordia University, where he currently teaches. In 2015 he was awarded the Claudine and Stephen Bronfman Fellowship in Contemporary Art. His work has been exhibited internationally.

This exhibition is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, in partnership with Kuma International.