SARAJEVO, BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA — The artists of Sarajevo were always a cheeky bunch. They made the craters left by mortar shells look like flowers and inaugurated an international film festival in the middle of a war.
These days, their canvas is a field beside the city's history museum, where they recently erected a monument to the suffering that Bosnians endured during the brutal war of the early 1990s:
A 10-foot replica of a tin can of meat.
It is blue and gold and reminds every Sarajevan of the years under siege, being fed by well-meaning, if clueless, aid workers.
"That stuff was so bad that if your cat ate it, his fur would fall off," Jela Dzino, a 68-year-old retiree, reminisced about the donated Spam-like substance.
Those behind the monument say the point is clear: Art can be used to recount and even lampoon the past.
The past remains a complicated issue in Bosnia-Herzegovina, where the Muslim, Croat and Serb factions who fought, killed and died are living in peace again, but hardly in harmony.
Providing their own testament to the vicissitudes, dozens of museums and art exhibits have sprung up in Sarajevo since the end of the war 12 years ago, all competing to tell a version of history that is often politicized, minimized or distorted. And in the jumble, some Sarajevans worry, the city is losing its famous multiethnic tradition.
Museums dormant
"One of our problems is that we are trying to change history and the past and make it better than it was, especially each for their own ethnic group," said Jacob Finci, something of an elder statesman in Sarajevo who is in charge of developing a new civil service for Bosnia.
Finci said that as various groups squabbled over how history should be told, including a government made up of Muslims, Serbs and Croats, museums lay dormant for far too many years after the war ended. It took a decade to reopen the venerable Jewish Museum; the National Museum opened, then closed because of money shortages (and eventually reopened).
The graceful 19th century neo-Renaissance palace that houses the National Museum survived its unfortunate location on the combat front line, emerging battered but salvageable. Today, although one temporary exhibition portrays Ottoman-era Bosnian life, the museum's primary collections are of medieval tombstones, prehistoric fossils and Roman antiquities -- mostly items from before the land was populated with Serbs, Muslims and Croats.
