Witness
An exhibition by Marija Zrno
February 1-6, in the crypt of St Mary's Cathedral
St Mary's Rd, Sydney
Reviewed by Jasmina Bajraktarevic
This is a confronting exhibition of images from the war in Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina. Marija Zrno paints not as a detached observer but as one of the 250,000 Australians of Croatian origin for whom the war in Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina is not just a faraway TV story.
Born in Bosnia-Hercegovina and migrating to Australia as a child, Zrno has focused her artistic output on the horror enveloping the land of her birth. Zrno is back in Sydney for this exhibition, but she bases herself in the Croatian capital, Zagreb. The 36-year-old artist, who trained at St George College in Sydney, has devoted the past three years to portraying the consequences of the war in her homelands.
This show developed out of a recent exhibition in Zagreb. Witness focuses on the human dimension of the conflict and its effect on civilian lives. Major themes are children of the war, who are forced to live in the middle of human madness; and rape victims, women who are completely denied any human right. Her painting is a cry for recognition of the world's guilt for allowing the war to happen.
Zrno has seen and heard the stories while guiding foreign journalists to the front. Through this occasional job she exposed herself to the reality of the war and its victims. She told me that she could not stay in Sydney, watch the TV news, and read newspaper articles about the war.
She speaks about her own despair over a world that rewards criminals and punishes their victims. The lessons of our past seem lost to us; our fate is to repeat the barbarity of the darkest chapters of our history. Humankind claims the title of civilised, while rape and torture are still a daily reality for many women in the notorious Serbian concentration camps. This contradiction is emphasised by the choice of the cathedral crypt as the venue of the exhibition. The peaceful Gothic crypt, a symbol of culture, contrasts with the agony of the women and children.
The exhibition's title is derived from one of the motifs: the faceless image of a child gazing on the violence.
Some paintings show rape victims at the moment of their violation, struggling vainly against the hands that hold them. Women's bodies bear unsightly bruises; their hair has been shaved off and their flesh is grey and shadowy. Their soundless screams echo from all the paintings in this series.
Zrno's purpose is to address the desensitising effect of the mass media's coverage of the war, which has diluted the human dimension of the conflict. She connects the world with the private pain. I felt frightened and stressed by the emotions communicated through the paintings: fear, anger, grief.
In addition to paintings, Zrno made 300 sculptures of the children's heads. Each head is different, each child is different, each pain is different. Some time ago, six children were killed in Sarajevo. Do they have names? Zrno says that children are not numbers: they are lives, lost childhoods. Her intention is to make us understand the difference between number and human being.
Zrno's paintings are about real people, about real women who are being tortured in the rape camps today, about real children witnessing unimaginable horror. The rawness and freshness of the paint draws the viewer into the canvas and forces him/her to participate in the scene as a witness like the faceless child.