May 26, 1999

CONTENTS:

The Lost Art of Kosovo, a Casualty of War

On a Less Visible Front, Serbs Continue Assault on Culture & Creativity

TIRANA, Albania-On the day NATO began its bombing campaign against Yugoslavia, the Kosovar playwright Fadil Hysaj desperately began to download some of his writings from his computer. There wasn't much time. Hysaj had been told his name was on a Serbian blacklist of ethnic Albanian artists targeted for arrest. He pocketed five floppy disks and ran.
But in his haste, Hysaj used defective disks. And when the 44-year-old dramatist reached Albania, he discovered that much of his life's work had been left behind in Pristina, capital of the Serbian province. Removing his glasses and closing his eyes in tearless grief, Hysaj catalogues the loss--30 plays staged in back-street theaters over the previous decade, five dramas-in-progress, an unfinished novel, and his diaries and working papers. "This is the very worst situation," said Hysaj, who was also dean of the unofficial Academy of the Arts in Kosovo. "Many artists and intellectuals were blacklisted and went into hiding. They had no time to collect their works. The art is lost forever."
The flames that have swept across Kosovo in the past weeks, driving more than 700,000 refugees before them, have also consumed the cultural breath of a people, the final assault on Kosovo's intelligentsia after 10 years of repression. Painters, sculptors, composers, filmmakers and writers were forced to abandon their work and flee to Albania or Macedonia as refugees. And most of them fear that generations of creation--the words and images that gave expression to the idea of Kosovo--have been burned.
"The biggest trauma is [wondering] if some of this work can be re-created," said Hysaj, adding that the only museum of Kosovo art may now be in the power of memory. Serbian forces, according to artists here, have destroyed many of the artistic spaces, such as the Dodona Theater and Gallery in Pristina and Studio N in Pec, where ethnic Albanian arts flourished in opposition to the Belgrade regime's attempts to smother any expression that could be deemed to have nationalist overtones. The homes of individual artists like Hysaj were well known to the authorities, who viewed them as nests of sedition.
Few artists, no matter how apolitical their creations, escaped the terror and destruction. The composer Rauf Dhomi was forced to bribe Serb paramilitaries to escape Pristina, and he left without any of his compositions or instruments. The painter Rexhep Ferri, now living in a refugee camp in Durres, left his work hanging on his walls and in his studio.
"If you want to destroy an identity, you start with culture," said Gezim Qendro, director of the National Arts Gallery in Tirana. "This kind of destruction is state politics." To strike back, and to remind people of what has been lost, Qendro opened an exhibit earlier this month of the works of the Kosovar painter Mujlim Mulliqi and the sculptor Agim Gavdarbasha. Both artists earlier moved much of their work here, fearing it could be seized or destroyed if shown in Kosovo.
The paintings of Mulliqi, who died last year, are fierce in their rendering of human anguish. Gavdarbasha's sculpture--including decapitated heads resting on tree trunks--are studies in cruelty. The exhibit is all the more chilling because Gavdarbasha, who lived in Pristina, is unaccounted for, according to Hysaj. "We don't know if he is safe," he said. "And he is not the only one--Faruk Begolli, the director of Dodona Theater; Istref Begolli, one of our best actors. There are others missing."
Kosovo's artists have had to operate outside public institutions for the past 10 years. When Slobodan Milosevic, now Yugoslavia's president, stripped the province of its political autonomy in 1989, he also began a campaign of sweeping cultural repression against ethnic Albanians, who accounted for some 90 percent of the population. The works of ethnic Albanian artists were removed from the walls of public galleries, and ethnic Albanian administrators at such institutions were fired. Kosovo Film, an independent studio devoted to ethnic Albanian cinema, was forcibly closed. Leading directors and actors were fired at the Popular Theater of Kosovo, which was renamed the Popular Theater; a number of anodyne Albanian productions were staged each year to maintain a facade of pluralism. Public television was also cleansed of ethnic Albanians. The government-supported symphony and the choir of Radio Pristina were purged. Leading Albanian dancers at the ballet in Pristina were forced out of their jobs, and choreographic references to Albanian folklore were removed from productions. Hundreds of intellectuals and writers were jailed.
"The cultural destruction began in the early '90s," Hysaj said. "It was so systematic and it was so cold." Throughout the 1990s, Albanians had organized a parallel system of government, including schools and medical facilities, as part of their pacifist resistance to Milosevic's policies. And an underground ethnic Albanian arts community also developed, including the Academy of the Arts in Pristina, where 200 students attended classes--not on a campus but in the home studios of older artists. Theater sprang up in commercial buildings leased to drama companies after the workday ended. Painters showed their work in cafes and restaurants. Small presses turned out poetry and fiction.
"We simply were isolated," said Nexhat Krasniqi, a caricaturist, graphic artist and filmmaker who ran Studio N in Pec, an open house where young artists came to study. "The only resistance we had was to get inside the studio and work. That was our freedom." On the wall of the apartment in Tirana where Krasniqi is living hang seven works. Fantastic, funny, colorful and biting, the pieces are a bitter reminder of what has been lost.
Krasniqi was forced into hiding late last year, moving from house to house each night after Serb police raided his home. His work, including logos for ethnic Albanian political parties, embraced the cause of Kosovo independence.
"War is not only made through weapons but through art," he said. When Krasniqi fled to Albania through Montenegro, he left behind 300 to 400 original works and 12,000 drawings for an animated film. Studio N was targeted in the first days of the "ethnic cleansing" of Pec. But Krasniqi, like other refugee artists, believes the will to create anew will rekindle Kosovo's ethnic Albanian cultural life--even in the muddy refugee camps. He is drawing. Ferri is painting. Hysaj is working on a new play called, appropriately, "The Last Exhibition."
"The artistic spirit, even with the destruction we have witnessed, didn't die and won't die," Krasniqi said. "We breathe as other men. We are connected to the world. That is why I am optimistic."
(c) Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company

Stolen art from York (UK) found

Re: alarm systems and their shortcomings

In a message dated 5/22/99 1:19:59 AM, securma@xs4all.nl writes:
From: Susan Young syoung@NWARK.NET
Subject: alarm systems and their shortcomings
Our alarm system (fire and intrusion) has its central panel located in our main museum building, with "satellite" alarms in our historic outbuildings working off this central panel. To make a long story short, we continually have problems with false alarms originating in the outbuildings, especially during stormy weather, and the alarm technicians say that nothing can be done to fix this problem, because the root of it lies with the fact that our configuration requires a central alarm with satellite alarms in the outbuildings.
Is there anyone out there who has a configuration similar to ours that is enjoying successful operation of their alarm system? Our staff members are getting really tired of having to come to the museum at 2 am during a rain storm because the alarms are going off.
Regards,
Susan Young
Shiloh Museum of Ozark History

RE: alarm systems and their shortcomings

Re: alarm systems and their shortcomings

Susan Young--Alarm Systems