Friday, November 20, 1998
Exhibit’s textile works heal wounds
ART: Bosnian women use weaving to make money, overcome horrors
of war
By Sandy Yang
Daily Bruin Contributor
Art isn’t just a mode of expression for the Bosnian-refugee
artisans whose textile art is being exhibited at the Museum of
Tolerance. For these women – who have survived the hell of
witnessing their loved ones massacred, their houses burned down,
and their lives destroyed by systematic killing and raping in the
Bosnian War – their woven creations represent the effort of
rebuilding themselves from within.
The exhibit at the Museum of Tolerance is the first time these
works will appear in a museum. The Museum of Tolerance, which
showed exhibits a few years ago about the Bosnian War in a photo
essay, deals specifically with the issues and histories of
inhumanity to man, especially from the Holocaust and other
genocide.
While television showed news of the negotiations and the warfare
in Bosnia, Serbian armies forced hundreds of thousands of innocent
Muslims and Croats out of their homes during a campaign of ethnic
cleansing and territorial conquest.
"(The Serbian forces) simply went through villages, and anyone
who had a Muslim name … (was) massacred," says Jane Ten-Brink,
the curator of exhibitions at the Museum of Tolerance.
"They lost everything in their lives overnight," Ten-Brink
continues. "They didn’t have homes anymore and lost very close
people in their families."
UCLA professor of the history of religion S. Scott Bartchy adds,
"That religion is brought in as a justification for people – who
used to live on the same street – (to kill) each other is
abominable. It makes absolutely no sense in terms of these
individual people’s religions."
The senseless destruction and extermination would cause more
than three million people to become refugees. Since 1993, Bosnian
women fled to Austria and found a safe haven from the warfare in
their homeland. There, Austrian psychoanalyst Dr. Gertrud Wuerbel
visited the women and offered psychological counseling. Therapy was
offered through writing in journals and discussing their writing in
groups.
However, these women were far from home, with the knowledge that
recovering their previous lives would be impossible. In 1995,
Wuerbel involved the refugees in weaving textile-art as hope for
the future.
"(Wuerbel) realized they surely weren’t going home, so she added
something that would give them structure and meaning in their
current life," says Ten-Brink.
"She realized that to help them, she was never going to give
them back what they lost; she couldn’t give them back dead
relatives; she couldn’t give them back homes that were burned down;
she couldn’t give them back their homeland," Ten-Brink continues.
"The only thing she could give them was the means in which they
could rebuild their psychological strength and the will to live
again, so they could have a hope to create a new life for
themselves. And that is what she did."
In the refugee center in Frasztanz, Austria, Wuerbel worked
thousands of hours with these women – most of whom were rape
victims, immersed in a foreign setting with no money or even the
knowledge of the language. With a subsidy from the Austrian
government, Wuerbel established the Susret/Encounter program, a
workshop for making textile arts as a means of personal
healing.
"Susret/Encounter is an example of the healing power of art,"
Wuerbel said in a recent press release.
Ten-Brink says, "A putting together of different strands, a
putting together of different materials – the experience of
actually doing is therapeutic in the sense that it reaches down
into a mental process of taking all the strands of one’s past,
which includes pain and suffering and rebuilding it together."
Bringing in professionals to train the refugees in her program,
the women learned techniques from Bosnia, as well as different
techniques and styles from patchwork quilting to American Indian
weaving techniques. High-quality material such as silk, linen, wool
and cotton were used to create the tapestries, quilts and
decorative wall hangings, with each artist signing her work.
"At one level, it is about refabricating the broken self
inside," Ten-Brink says. "At another level, it’s very practical,
it’s given them something to do."
Recently, these textiles have been sold to maintain the workshop
because its financial support will end soon. In Voralberg – a
region of Austria where many textile manufacturers thrive – the
refugee center and textile workshop has an ideal location to sell
these creations.
"Today, selling these textiles, which they have made in the
Susret/Encounter program, is the only means for the refugees, who
ask for no charity money, to earn their daily bread," Wuerbel said
in a recent press release.
More than just a local staple of the economy, these textile
artworks have been displayed around the world in public buildings
and town halls in Brussels and in government buildings and
galleries. Last year, they were shown at the New York School of
Design in their U.S. premiere.
Along with the works are photographs of Sarajevo before and
after the war, text material dealing with the workshop and
photographs of the women. The works shown in the exhibit are also
for sale. With the money that Susret sends from the sale of the
textiles, these women will begin to rebuild their homes and their
lives.
ART: Textile-arts appear at the Susret/Encounter: Artists and
Refugees program at the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of
Tolerance through Feb. 14, 1999. For more information, call (310)
553-9036. For information about purchasing the textile art, call
(310) 574-9546.Museum of Tolerance
Bosnian refugee Nuhra Mahmotivic is one of many Susret-trained
weavers whose works are displayed at the Museum of Tolerance.
"Chair" is a tapestry showing in the Susret/Encounter exhibit,
which displays the textile art of Bosnian refugee women.
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