
“[…] Above the grandiose columns and the front doors of the Palais am Festungsgraben, next to the Maxim Gorki Theater in Mitte, hangs a large poster with a young woman defiantly staring down on you. Emblazoned over her in an enormous sharpie-scrawl are the phrases: “NO TEETH…? A MOUSTACHE…? SMEL LIKE SHIT…? BOSNIAN GIRL”. The woman pictured is the artist herself, Šejla Kamerić, the words overtop of her left by Dutch ‘peacekeepers’ on the walls of barracks just outside of Srebrenica in 1994 or 1995, around the time of the Srebenica genocide of more than 8,000 Bosniaks during the Bosnian War. The work is in stark contrast with the neo-classicist building, which evokes histories of palpable hierarchies. Kamerić’s powerful piece, titled ‘Bosnian Girl’, is emblematic of ‘De-Heimatize It!’, as it unsettles our ingrained expectations of what lies within an institutional space such as this one. Within the multiple floors of the Palais am Festungsgraben, the artists act like moss, they dig through the cement of the architecture, destabilizing the historical foundation of the institution. […]”