Sarajevo Guided Tours
Sarajevo Guided Tours shows eight different locations within a city, the individual urban excerpts organized into brief, discrete segments. While the title refers to the format of a tourists gaze and experience, Isa Rosenberger subverts the idea of a guided tour by examining the question of how places are invented. Guided tours usually concentrate on highlights in the conventional sense. They are incorporated into this moment of the extraordinarys construction, which serves as a catalyst for Rosenbergers portrait of the city, a story resembling both documentary videography and subjective narration.
The footage was shot during the artists ten-day visit to Sarajevo in April 2001. Invited to tour the city as part of the At First Sight project, an initiative organized by the
Sarajevo Center for Contemporary Art (SCCA), eight individuals she meets during her stay are asked to take her to places with a special personal significance and then
describe them. The result is eight consecutive portraits of public spaces and their inhabitants in which private and public history are woven into a fabric of architectural impressions, individual perspectives and ideas, and structural, factual data concerning everyday life in a city still associated primarily with images of the siege and destruction. The portraits are preceded by a prologue: Black-and-white television footage, taken from The Sarajevo Tunnel by Edis Kolar, shows the May 1992 siege. In the course of the work the prologue, the title and the portraits merge to form a text both real and imaginary entitled Sarajevo. (Rike Frank)
Translation: Steve Wilder
Sarajevo Guided Tours
2002
Austria
30 min