News from Bosnia Herzegovina: Edin Numankadic
Allan Graubard
Edin Numankadic is one of Sarajevo’s leading artists. In a city still emerging from the genocidal war protracted against it in the 1990s, Numankadic, by way of his person and his art, is cause for hope. A tall energetic man in his 50s, he draws you to him as much by his affable sense of humor as by an intensity he carries just beneath his skin, an intensity yet that is purely interior. Once having met, he is not someone you will forget.
I first encountered Numankadic’s art in 1998 at a gallery in Washington, DC dedicated to Balkan cultures. Gallery LIPA (Links for the International Promotion of the Arts) relocated to Chicago several years ago, where it continues, holding important exhibitions and performances.
It was in October, 2001 though, when I jurored the MES Sarajevo International Theater Festival, that I was finally able to meet Numankadic at his studio in the Ali Pshjini Polge section of the city. a small, three-room flat on the 5th floor of a nondescript walk up that bordered the no man’s land between Bosnian and Serb positions during the war, and which still bore evidence of shell scars and bullet holes. We met several times after that at cafes in Sarajevo, and have since sustained our friendship.
Numankadic’s studio is his touchstone. It is where he finds the solitude necessary for his creations as for his general peace of mind. Without it, as he notes below, he might not be who he is today. The place has several small windows awash with dust, but the light you notice — the light that clarifies – comes from his canvasses, found objects, collage boxes, art by colleagues worldwide, and books scattered everywhere.
The following text appears in the catalogue to an exhibition of his Inscriptions series at Gradska Gallery in Bihac, Bosnia Herzegovina, which opened in January: "For several years during the war I did Inscriptions. I came here; I walked eight km every day after work to my studio. I needed to do this. The work allowed me to keep my sanity, my mental health. Sometimes it was dangerous. What else could I do? I had to create to survive. It was a matter of survival, of waking up the next morning. You were all… I left seven or eight times during the war, too. I’d travel to Paris, Berlin, where exhibitions of my work were held. I even went to Seoul, S. Korea, where I received first prize in an international art exposition. And when I left, my friends would ask me to stay. ‘How could I return to Sarajevo,’ they’d ask. ‘I was in danger, there was the war,’ and so on. ‘Why not stay here, work here’?"
"I returned to Sarajevo each time. This is where I come from. My family has been here for 400 years. I would leave through the tunnel that ran under the airport and return through the tunnel. I would leave Europe, and all the freedom and wealth there, and come home, war or no war. I could easily have left. I didn’t."–Edin Numankadic The Art of Edin Numankadic–Inscriptions
Eyes that draw, hands that read; a language of gesture, choreography of signs. The syntax of time, the slow inevitable corrosion of meaning.
I remember, I forget; I remember to forget, I forget to remember. Memory sifts through me. I close my eyes, I open them. I am man and stone, the stone that outlasts the man, the man who marks the stone to outlast himself.
A word, a phrase. I put down the book, I put down myself, I pick up my brush, I stand above the stone, the canvas stone, the two-dimensional rectangle that mimics the stones of my place, my time, my origin. What will carry my wonder, my despair, my anger, hope, love, loss, my triumph, my defeat, my silence, my breath, my sight better than the canvas stone? What will return a space as small as a moment, as close as a sky, as sudden as a street? – the canvas stone.
But I will not let the canvas stone be. I give to it what it refuses to take. I struggle, I work, I inscribe. And I do it again, and again; again, and again on the same space, the same brittle obscurity. I will not rest until the inscription divests me of the illusions I haunt. I will not rest until I haunt the inscription, no longer having need of my illusions, my need for illusion. I will not rest until the inscription banishes any hope I might have placed in my compact with meaning or silence, with stillness or dance, with embrace, with solitude, with plentitude. I will not rest until I wrest from the canvas stone the closing of a final door into the depth of the matter at hand.
For the canvas stone, which is its own door, and which opens and closes by its own will, repudiates me. It is as much as it is not. It becomes; it reveals; it whirls to a sudden irreplaceable stop. Only then is it free; only then does its freedom infect me. Only then does the process of inscribing catapult into time the pure power of the act. The act that inscribes me into all I am not; that sustains and banishes me; that turns and returns; that transforms the canvas into stone, the stone into canvas–the act of inscribing the canvas stone.
There is no fable here and no poetry. There is no fiction and no philosophy. There is no seduction and no mask. There is only the act on the canvas stone: the rhythm of signs that have lost their meaning; the sign of a rhythm that provokes an aspiration to assign it a meaning–and the convulsion of the encounter between them.
The canvas stone is not a mirror to the self; it is a selfless mirror to the space that time inhabits. Its body is silence; its speech gesture. It is the clarity of accepting the distance between memory and image, language and meaning, place and movement, origin and exile, beauty and disfigurement. It is, for its own time, which is ours, our time, a timeless enigma that abuses the abuse we have heaped on meaning, on language and on gesture.
Nor is the canvas stone of Edin Numankadic exclusive. It is in each place we look, any moment we catch on the run or that catches us, that fixes us. It is the place where we shred ourselves when we look and when we listen anew. It is the shredding itself in the heat of time that inscribes its marks on the space we inhabit.
Here are the Inscriptions of Edin Numankadic, inscriptions with the density of stone.
