The Diplomat in Spain

On the occasion of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Independence Day on 1 March, the Embassy of this Balkan country invites you to an online exhibition by Adis Elias Fejzić (ADDIS), entitled The Art of Stećak. The virtual visit to the exhibition can be made by clicking on this link.

Stećak are a cultural and historical treasure of the Balkans. Together with the epitaphs, as they are called, texts of various shapes and drawings that are engraved on them, they represent a unique phenomenon in Europe and the world. Among the 70,000 historical gravestones that exist in the Balkan region, 60,000 are found on the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The aim of the artistic research is to explain the art of stećak through an apparent ambiguity of its complex sculptural forms and its content, as the timeless principle and the absolute potential of stone sculpture. The author, Adis Elias Fejzić (ADDIS), is a Bosnian-Herzegovinian sculptor who graduated from the Secondary School of Applied Arts and later from the Academy of Fine Arts in Sarajevo, where he also holds a master’s degree. He earned a PhD degree from Queensland College of Art (Griffith University-Brisbane), for multidisciplinary research devoted to the art of stećak, a medieval tradition of Bosnian tombstone sculpture. Addis analyses this traditional art both within its own medieval context and within the artistic and socio-anthropological circumstances of today. He explains and redefines the sculptural format and meaning of the stećak while creatively “resurrecting” and re-enacting this stone memorial tradition as its own artistic expression.