Mohsen Rastani Exhibition Opened | AGAINST OBLIVION: Sarajevo 1994/1996
As part of the cooperation between the Ministry of Veterans Affairs of the Sarajevo Canton, the University of Sarajevo and the WARM Festival, an exhibition by Mohsen Rastani, one of the most important Iranian documentary photographers, will be open at the Sarajevo Memorial Center from 4 to 17 June 2026. The curator of the exhibition is Lejla Hodžić.
The exhibition opening took place on Thursday, 4 June 2026 at the Sarajevo Memorial Center in the presence of the author Mohsen Rastani.
Mohsen Rastani (1958) is an Iranian documentary photographer from the post-revolutionary period. He graduated in photography from the University of Tehran. During his career, he documented social and humanitarian issues in various crisis and post-war areas, including Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1994 to mid-1996, when he took photographs in Sarajevo, Tuzla and Mostar. He exhibited his photographs at numerous exhibitions in Iran and other countries, among which the most significant ones were at the Venice Biennale in 2011 and at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris in 2014. Today Mohsen Rastani lives and works in Germany.
Mohsen Rastani is not a classic war reporter. In his photographs, the faces of people during the war are portrayed, where pain, suffering and loneliness, but also short-lived moments of happiness are recorded. In his words - photography is a medium for freezing time in a frame capsule. But his paintings exude life: a man still has one leg, a woman with a burnt face is still alive, a child on the street looks at you like a grown man. Time is not frozen in any of the photos.
Mohsen Rastani prints his nightmares, mounts them in square and rectangular frames and shows us extreme bitterness in a world full of disasters, to remind us not to forget our fears, nightmares. It tries to wake us up in a world on the brink of disaster, but also to give us hope that peace is possible.
For the first time in Sarajevo, the exhibition brought together a selection of 60 photographs taken in Sarajevo and Bosnia and Herzegovina during and immediately after the siege, in the period from 1994 to 1996. Rastani, who came to Bosnia after his experiences documenting the wars in Iran and Lebanon, uses photographs to record everyday life, the consequences of war, the first moments after the siege and people who continue to live despite the destruction.
Resulting from the author's long-term stay in the city, these photographs represent a rare and intimate testimony of a foreign author about Sarajevo and Bosnia and Herzegovina at the moment of transition from war to peace.
