One of the most signigicant artists of the contemporary Balkans returns to Skopje.
Šejla Kamerić transforms the Museum of Contemporary Art into a space of vigilance, remembrance, and shared vulnerability.
On 18 September, Kontrapunkt, as part of CRIC – Festival for Critical Culture 2026, will host AWAKE — a site-responsive light installation by Šejla Kamerić.
📍 Museum of Contemporary Art – Skopje
📅 18 September 2026
🕕 18:00
For more than two decades, the art of Šejla Kamerić has created space to reflect on what the Balkans, Europe, and the world at large often attempt to suppress: memory, trauma, violence, identity, political responsibility, and the fragility of living together.
Kamerić creates works that emerge from specific historical and personal experiences, while opening questions that concern us all: How do we remember? What does it mean to bear witness? How can we remain sensitive to the vulnerability of others at a time when violence, crises, and uncertainty are becoming part of everyday life?
🔴 ABOUT THE INSTALLATION
We live in a present defined by acceleration, a time in which sources of anxiety seem to multiply relentlessly and at ever greater speed: human-made catastrophes, debilitating uncertainties, and countless reasons for pessimistic predictions about the future. Many of us who have the privilege of not being directly confronted with war, destruction, violence, and existential fears on a daily basis are nevertheless accompanied by a sense of despair, seeming helplessness, and being overwhelmed. Terrifying news continuously rains down upon us, while it becomes increasingly difficult to resist the pull of doomscrolling and the constant barrage of information across all channels.
The normalization of horror is an alarming symptom that must be resisted under all circumstances. The temptation to join the digital chorus of anonymous commentary is often overwhelming, even though it so frequently generates little more than further hatred and division.
At the same time, alongside these larger realities, there is also the deeply personal: private everyday worries, losses, fears, and intimate grief. This bewildering mixture of emotions accompanies many of us, and more than ever we should reassure one another that we are not alone in this condition we call the present.
Especially now, we need committed acts of communal empathy and solidarity in our shared vulnerability. Šejla Kamerić offers us precisely such an opportunity: a temporary space for togetherness and respectful reflection.
For more than twenty-five years, Kamerić has created such moments through her artistic projects- particularly in public, freely accessible urban spaces – moments that not only make realities visible and foster awareness, but also concretely open spaces for civic resistance against repression, violence, and hatred.
These actions need not take the form of loud gestures or shouted slogans, which often merely reaffirm the methods of power. Rather, such resistant alliances can also emerge quietly, through an appreciative coexistence grounded in mutual respect and recognition — one that allows room for contradiction and difference.
With AWAKE, Kamerić creates an atmosphere reminiscent of a vigil. Such vigils usually arise for a specific reason, as explicitly articulated protests or expressions of mourning in response to a particular event. Here, however, there is intentionally no certainty, no factual trigger, no fixed narrative, no named memory.
Curatorial statement by Astrid Peterle
“AWAKE creates a bridge between the private and the collective, a fragile architecture built from light, shadow, and memory. Here, mourning becomes a shared act. The viewer is not outside the frame, but woven into it. The gaze no longer consumes. It participates, trembles, breathes. Kamerić’s images and spaces act as mirrors in which countless others join our own reflection: the disappeared, the bereaved, the forgotten.
To be awake, in Kamerić’s vocabulary, means to refuse numbness. She insists that awareness is an ethical gesture — that recognizing another’s pain is the beginning of resistance. This awakening does not promise redemption. It is fierce, raw, at times unbearable. Like the moment before tears begin to fall, like the second before dawn, when the world holds its breath. Kamerić’s art makes this liminal space tangible: the bridge suspended between dreaming and waking, death and survival, forgetting and remembering. The noise of collective loss is everywhere. And yet, here too is the gentle resilience of the living — the whisper that survival itself is an act of defiance. AWAKE trembles between absence and presence, both as a quiet rebellion against erasure. Kamerić transforms mourning into a form of vigilance.”
— excerpt from the text “AWAKE”, dedicated to the work, by Iskra Geshoska
📢 AWAKE is a call to remembrance, but also to active vigilance.
To attention, but also to empathy.
To togetherness, without demanding that we be the same.
Because being awake does not only mean remaining constantly on alert. It also means recognizing that we are tired — tired of a present in which vigilance sometimes seems like our only shared possibility.
As part of this year’s edition of CRIC – Festival for Critical Culture, whose theme is “Care: The Challenge of Being Together Again,” AWAKE opens precisely such a space: a space in which we can pause together, remember our shared vulnerability, and, at least for a moment, simply be present with one another.
🔴 ABOUT ŠEJLA KAMERIĆ
Šejla Kamerić (born 1976, Sarajevo) is an internationally recognized visual artist whose work explores memory, identity, politics, and the legacy of conflict. Her notable public projects include EU/Others (Manifesta Biennial, 2000), Bosnian Girl (2003), Ab uno disce omnes (Wellcome Collection, London, 2015), and CEASE (Venice, 2024).
She is known for her intimate, socio-political commentaries that permeate her diverse artistic practice. Grounded in empathy as a fundamental mode of communication between artist, subject, and viewer, her practice both reveals and constructs spaces of power and political engagement.
Kamerić has exhibited widely at major institutions, including Tate Modern (London), Centre Pompidou (Paris), MACBA (Barcelona), Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (Rotterdam), Istanbul Modern, and MMCA (Seoul).
In 2026, her work will be presented as part of Manifesta 16 Ruhr and the Mardin Biennial. Kamerić is the recipient of the ECF Routes Princess Margriet Award for Cultural Diversity (2011).
CRIC – FESTIVAL FOR CRITICAL CULTURE
The motto of CRIC continues to be grounded in the thought of Alain Badiou:
“A community founded on a political culture of critical action and confrontation is a community of freedom, reciprocity, and courageous navigation towards new horizons of society, with sails propelled by the winds of creative artistic confrontation and political imagination.”
Artistic Director and Programme Curator of CRIC – Festival for Critical Culture:
Iskra Geshoska
Programme Consultants and Organisers:
Tijana Ana Spasovska and Artan Sadiku
Collaborating Team:
Petar Milat, Zorica Zafirovska, Aleksandra Bubevska, KOMA Design Studio
More information:
CRIC – Facebook
CRIC – Instagram
Kontrapunkt – YouTube
Partnerships and support
CRIC – Festival for Critical Culture is supported within the framework of the Culture for Development project of the Government of Switzerland, implemented by the Hartefact Fund. The content and views expressed do not in any way represent the views of the Government of Switzerland or the Hartefact Fund.
CRIC – Festival for Critical Culture is supported by ProPeace North Macedonia, Friedrich Ebert Stiftung Skopje, the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, Future Bright Art Foundation, Goethe-Institut Skopje, and the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of the Republic of North Macedonia.
Споделено на: September 9, 2026 во 3:06 pm