A Crime That Was Waiting to Happen
The data collected over the years by courts, publications and research are presented in the form of exhibitions, documentaries, lectures and debates in order to inform the public about the facts of the war in Kosovo and to create a new comprehensive space for the creation of collective memory.
This exhibition commemorates the 1620 persons who disappeared during the armed conflict in Kosovo and the immediate aftermath, including the years 1998 and 2000. It comes at a time of denouncements and the discovery of long suspected mass graves in the territory of Serbia.
The details of the 1620 persons revealed in this exhibition are not the details of missing or disappeared persons, but rather the details of people who were abducted, made disappear by force, executed and hidden in mass graves, which, over the course of more than 20 years since the crimes were committed against the people of Kosovo, have been obscured, thus making the search and, as a result, their discovery, more and more complicated.
Grass has overtaken the soil where the traces and proof lie.
Once upon a time, is a normal beginning of every fairy tale. In this case it is the beginning of a war story. A world that is revealed to us, through the innocent eyes of children, is a world that similar to a fairy tale should never belong to reality.
This exhibition was done together with the family members and it expresses their wish to remember these children through the remaining objects of an interrupted childhood.
The political crisis that had been developing in Kosovo from the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s culminated in an armed conflict between the forces of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) and Serbia and the Kosovo Liberation Army, or KLA, from mid-1998. During that conflict there were incidents where excessive and indiscriminate force was used by the Yugoslav Army (VJ) and Serbian Police units of the Ministry of the Interior (MUP), resulting in civilian deaths, population displacement and damage to civilian property. Despite efforts to bring the crisis to an end, which included sending an international verification mission to Kosovo, the conflict continued through to and beyond 24 March 1999, when NATO forces launched an air campaign against targets in the FRY. The bombing campaign ended on 10 June 1999, followed by the withdrawal of FRY and Serbian forces from Kosovo.
Ismet Jonuzi is a painter and sculptor who lives and works in Kosovo. In the exhibition ‘Structure of Peace’, he brought to the viewers three sculptures made of weapons which were used during the war in Kosovo and which the artist found in a factory where they had gathered to destroy them. In his artistic practices he has used these weapons to create sculptures, thus changing their function and turning them into works of art.
Wade Goddard photographed the conflict, the armies, the destruction and the casualties in Kosovo, from late 1997 to late 1999 he worked for the New York Times and Newsweek magazine. His work did not end there because he returned to Kosovo during the years 2000 - 2001, giving his contribution to other European newspapers and magazines.
