”Forgotten Memories” by Swede artist leif.e.boman.
By Susie Wong
An installation Forgotten Memories one of the works brought under the umbrella of Site+Sight: Translation Cultures (curated by Earl Lu Gallery) was sited away from the other artworks at the other and furthest, the installation by Swede artist leif.e.boman carries to us the grief of war-ravaged Bosnia in the 90s.
The installation is an experience with both visual and acoustic elements. A hum (of varying pitches and intensity) reverberates of the walls as one moves through the open interior and around the objects on the floor. One had to bend low to look at the cold images that line the four walls, of young faces, a gallery of 137 young boys from Bosnia. Placed on the floor in the centre of the gallery in an arrangement of the rectangular grids, further divided into geometrical shapes, are a series of plates in rows. 182 tiny mounds of earth in varying hues, brown, sepias, orange, slate grey, sit pristinely over the plates. This is earth collected from 182 countries and places all over the world, including concretedust and ash from the World Trade Center in New York, the football stadium in Kabul, Trebevi´c massegrave in Bosnia and crushed Sarajevo-Wall.
Boman`s work is based on the years of the Bosnian purge. Young men who are documented and missing, and whose identities are officially recorded and filed in their places in this installation, which becomes ultimately their ”mass graves”, as described by the Swede critic Bo Borg.
What is disquieting is the humming produced and played. Called earth symphony 1-182, the sounds are derived from a spectrographic technique (or spectrografitechnique) where the earth or soil/dust/ ashsample is converted to sounds. Each sample produced a different sound. It took two years for boman to realise his idea that ”earth has a voice” with the help of a university professor in His hometown Linköping. When listened to, it recalls the recorded sounds emitted by whales and the hum of Tibetan singing bowls. It seems to carry a deep mystical score. Boman´s says: ”I understand the Earth have much to say to many different people with different culture, different relations to the Earth”.
This mysticism is carried further by the architectural dimension of the site. The Artgallery at the NIE campus is a near cubiod space. Boman approaches it by likening it to the Kaba in Mecca.”The size of the Kaba nearly the same like the gallery, 14 x 14 x 12 meters, so that was the startingpoint”. Boman himself had for many years been interested in the mystical Sufism. His thoughts: ”Human life is fleeting, but the material of the Earth, Ash, etc, rise again in a new shapes. Death, birth, life. It is the Earth that has eternity, and stand the test…you are born from Earth and you shall reunite to the same. So the material has a spirit which I have to respect…the materials talks to me and I listen very carefully about which way we shall go together.”
The atrocities and killings of the ethnic purges in Bosnia are a recent event in the last decade. The effect of globalisation, a theme that underlies the Site+Sight event, is to disseminate news of the events of Bosnian war almost immediately and to a worldwide audience.
Just the other day I watched a television program by a BBC series called Looking for Karadzic. Karadzic was introduced to us as a man on the wanted list of the International Criminal Court, accused of genocide in Bosnia in the `90s, who is still free and in hiding. Interspersed among the investigative reporters attempts to locate him, were splices of interviews with those who had escaped the genocidal efforts, from acts of imprisonment’s to even random snipings. In a strong contrast to those who lived to tell the tale, were those who went missing, or those who remain unidentified, whose remnants of clothing and other tokens of belongings lay solemnly out on sheets spreads over the floor of an empty shelter.
Many similar programs have reached us through the media and we are invited to relive the horror and atrocities. But the impact of such news among the myriad of information disseminated through media is easily lost. Its audience becomes numbed. Reality programs assert their hypnotic power over us; we become glued to facets of human mind and consequent acts.
Ironically rather than react and respond to the barrage of such infocurrent reality news items, we fall into state of ”rigors mortis”. Marshall McLuhan had warned of televisions ability to numbs us; when speaking about Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, ”It involves us in moving depth, but it does not excite, agitate ore arouse.” What saves us from this ”rigor morti´s”is art. ” The hope of immunising society comes from the artist, who detects the changes in the wind resulting from new technologies long before they exert their full impact.”
Technology and the impact of global new media such as television, argues McLuhan, is to anaesthetise us from the pain of technological change, a consequence of converting the world in to a global village. Site+Sight: Translating Cultures (which ended in late July) is centred on the theme of globalisation. If McLuhan is right about art, the work of the artist here should theoretically at least halfway successful in thawing us out of our rigor mortis.
The installation by leif.e.boman and others projects by him are produced in places in Sarajevo and outside Bosnia. His work, that had grown over the years, with new elements constantly being changed, added and integrated into the installation, is a moving monument.
Boman himself would title it ”transposition”, as experiencing movement that is both an experiencing movement that is both an experience and a question, as transposing what one finds in that migration, and keeps and shows to others along the way. The installation, in varying forms, had been shown in Sweden in the towns of Upsala, Motala, Lund, and Linkoping, and in Sarajevo, Santiago de Chile, Sydney, Vancouver, Tokyo, Chongju, Kongju and Oursazate.
One cannot build monuments in land that constantly being ravaged. As a moving monument, it is a testament to those whose lives were blandly taken away, to impact a wider audience. In the repertoire of his work, boman finds and uses specific residue that originates from the land and builds these moving monuments to testify and reminds us of the dreadful events. One such work, called Sarajevo-Wall, was construction of an anti-war memorial made of six tons of building rubble from the bomb-damaged homes in Dobrinja Sarajevo.
These installations are hopeful in reminding us to feel more if we feel at all about loss and suffering, of reminding us of grief that is universal. Our own grief is represented in the 1967 War Memorial, a monument to the civilians who died (who also went missing) in the sook ching operations carried out during the Japanese Occupation here more than 50 years ago.