Cleaning Times

Standing before the installation Cleaning Times, one is struck by the intimate feel of it’s elements. The smell of dry hay. Someone’s clothes hung out to dry. Precisely because of this initial sense of familiarity, it can be dizzyingly disturbing to learn that these ordinary objects, or readymades, derive special significance from the reality they come from: the title, Cleaning Times, refers to the ethnic cleansing that took place during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1990s. The clothes belonged to victims of the massacres and genocide. The hay was harvested on the mass graves there. Here, a specific historical atrocity becomes physically insistent in its immediate presence. The artistic installation also evokes another meaning, one linked to the passage of time and the purification it brings. The hay bales point back to the incessantly growing grass, thereby providing a poetic perspective on life as it simply goes on, irrespective of all human conflicts. And the drying rack spreads its wings. Death and loss meets the longing for life and freedom (50 Favorites in the SMK Collection).