Reflections of wartime

"You come in here," she says, gesturing toward the ground. "And here is where the kitchen window used to be." In the vacant vast green field, the Sarajevo-born Bajevic is tracing the walls of her house. The house was lost to her and her family when they were expelled a decade ago in the war that tore through their native Bosnia and the rest of the Balkans.

Bajevic's video, "The Green Green Grass of Home," is part of a new exhibition at one of Israel's small, spunky art galleries here in Holon, an up-and-coming city 15 minutes east of Tel Aviv.

"History Started Playing With My Life" opened this month and runs through August at the Israeli Center for Digital Art (www.digitalartlab.org.il). It features artists almost exclusively from Israel and from the Balkans. The curator, Erzen Shkololli, is from the Kosovo city of Pec.

Pairing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with that of the Balkans, despite similar ethnic, religious and territorial overtones, sets up a flawed comparison, organizers of the exhibition readily acknowledge. But it is also, certainly, a provocative one -- standard for a breed of edgy venues in Israel that welcome deeply political art.

In "History Started Playing With My Life," the common theme is how war, its traumatic bruising of memory and its enduring consequences are experienced not by a nation but "individually by the artists," Shkololli says. "What entices me is how these 'personalized' works move away from a standard notion of geography as physical territory, and enter a kind of 'personal geography' that surpasses theoretical generalizations on war or conflict," Shkololli, 31, wrote in an essay introducing the exhibition.

The works, he said, become instead "something suffered directly on one's skin." And so, Bajevic, 39, discusses her lost home, mentally attempting to rebuild it.

Diego Rotman and Lea Mauas, Argentine Jews who immigrated to Israel several years ago, use old fax paper (the kind on which the image gradually disappears) to sketch the enormous wall that they've watched being built around them, to separate Israel from the Palestinian territories.

"Making walls, dividing cities