The Hills are Flat in the Dark
Oil on canvas, 92.5 x 129cm, 2024
This is a reworking of a wall-based painting realised in July 2022 at the Centre for Cultural Decontamination, Belgrade, Serbia
'In this painting I point to the fact that mass graves can often be those places of leisurely walks on which we are unaware of what lies below our feet. The painting refers to the events of 10th to 14th July 1995 in Srebrenica when 10,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys fled on foot to Tuzla through the forest to escape incoming Serbian forces. They were tracked down and killed and buried in mass graves under the forest floor. The painting interprets an illustration from Branko Ćopić’s story Hedgehog’s house also set in a forest which allegorically refers to the crisis and dangerous situation following the Tito-Stalin dispute and Yugoslavia’s exit from the Comintern in 1948, that is the chase of Hedgehog through the forest by Fox, Wolf and Boar in the story.'