An artist revisits famous images from the Kosovo war

By J.T-J. | VENICE

A MAN looks beyond the camera, his eyes imploring and filled with tears. He holds up his wallet, showing two passport-sized photographs of young children—they are standing against a standard studio background and smiling. The man has been recently moved from a prison where he was brutally tortured; his face is red, evidence of the boiling water that has been thrown on him. It is a tragic image, taken in 1999 by Peter Turnley, a photojournalist who was documenting the Kosovo war. An estimated 13,500 people were killed or went missing during the conflict, which lasted from February 1998 to June 1999; it is thought to have caused one of the largest population displacements in Europe since the second world war. Photographs such as this one communicated the personal suffering behind the headlines.

Marking the 20th anniversary of the end of the war, Alban Muja, a Kosovan artist, has made three of these images the starting point of an installation at the Venice Biennale. In three films, entitled “Family Album”, he interviews four child refugees, now adults, who were the subject of the photos. Lit against a dark background, the participants discuss their flight from Kosovo, the moment the photo was taken and the impact that its dissemination had on their families. “We asked them to describe the image, but through the image, they talk about what their family experienced,” Mr Muja says.

While the photos were published internationally, they became equally well-known in Kosovo itself, and all of the interviewees mention the strange kind of fame they achieved in their home country. Agim, at two years old, was pictured being passed through a barbed wire fence in a photo taken by Carol Guzy, a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist. He explains that he was uninterested in the image as a child—although his parents talked about it constantly—but was surprised to see it printed on a billboard. Whether they liked it or not, these children’s faces became part of history and of their country’s self-conception after independence was declared in 2008.

This formed part of the impetus for “Family Album”: Mr Muja wanted to offer these individuals some agency. Besa was pictured swaddled in blankets and breastfeeding from her mother at only six months old, a long line of refugees snaking out behind them. Besim and Jehona, the two children separated from their father (they reunited with him in Mitrovica after the war), discovered that the photograph was being given away as part of a NATO-themed collectible series from a chewing-gum brand. “Our idea was to focus totally on their story, to give the attention completely to them,” Mr Muja says.

Aged 18, the artist himself fled the violence in Kosovo for a refugee camp in Albania: the official opening date of the exhibition was chosen to coincide with the night his family left their home. It was a photo in the family album (pictured) that sparked his interest in this project to begin with: a snapshot of Mr Muja with José María Aznar, the Spanish prime minister at the time, who was visiting the camp (Spain had built it). “When I was nominated for the [Kosovan] pavilion, I was sure I was going to start from that image,” he says. “But I thought it would be much more important if I were to go beyond that, not only telling my personal story, but to research other images.”

This strategy is particularly notable at this year’s Biennale, where Christian Büchel, a Swiss-Icelandic artist, has been making headlines with his installation in a former shipyards. “Barca Nostra” exhibits the remains of a fishing vessel that capsized in 2015, killing hundreds of migrants who had packed into its hull. However, monumental and soulless, Mr Büchel’s work does little to help a privileged Western audience reconsider the struggles of migrants. Mr Muja’s work, by contrast, rejects spectacle in favour of refugees’ voices. It forces the viewer to consider how the images shown in the news affect those who are portrayed in them. “The idea was not just to talk about only the Kosovo war, to address something that is happening even now as well,” Mr Muja says.

“Family Album” continues at the Republic of Kosovo Pavilion at the Venice Biennale until November 24th