false memory

“this is a very beautiful country. the mountains, the rivers — a paradise.”

the man sitting at the table next to me says it without looking up from his crossword puzzle.
we are the only people on the restaurant terrace of the hotel.
the bosna flows just below. the wooden wheel by the river,
usually used to turn the spit, stands still.

eventually, he tells me very casually
that it was him who converted a former wehrmacht bunker into this hotel,
some two kilometers from the river’s source,
and that he also founded the bosnian tourism board.

i tell him that i’ve come here to photograph the river, the landscape, the people,
and ask him what he would recommend i see along the river going upstream.

he glances over the river. the wheel doesn’t move.

then he leans in and says,
“i wouldn’t recommend anything to anybody there. nothing.”

memory flow

two nobel laureates in literature instantly come to mind when viewing false memory: ivo andrić, whose novel the bridge on the drina remains an enduring meditation on time, conflict, and the human condition. his bridge, spanning the drina since the 16th century, is more than a structure of stone—it is a sentinel standing against the tides of nature, war, and human ambition, a monument to the continuity of existence amidst the ephemerality of time.

andrić’s bridge remains, while the river below flows on — a visual metaphor for the eternal against the transitory. kv’s visual pilgrimage along the bosna river, flowing from sarajevo to the sava, mirrors this contrast. the river carves its way through lands historically divided by religious, ethnic, and political lines, yet it unites them in its flow. in this act of observation, like hermann hesse’s siddhartha seeking wisdom by the river, kv listens to the silent stories carried by the current. the camera catches fleeting moments of bosnian life—the unexpected, transient vignettes that emerge with every twist and bend: a curious horse, a weathered war veteran posing, a somber procession of soldiers bearing the icon of tsar lazar on st. vitus’ day. each image becomes a fragment of a greater whole, a fractured mirror of bosnia — its stories bound together by the river’s constant motion.

yet, kv is not content to stand on the riverbank as an observer. his work demands immersion, both literally and figuratively. the artist merges with the water, his lens drawn into the river's depths. in the shallows, he captures the delicate interplay of sunlight and the riverbed, the fluid dynamics of nature’s flow. but as the river deepens, his vision becomes obscured — what lies beneath remains hidden, veiled by the river’s opacity. here, the surface becomes the subject, a reflective plane that carries only the ripples of light and the shifting patterns of water. these images, part of his series false memory, speak to the paradox of perception: that which is captured in an instant is already a memory, its truth slipping away even as the shutter closes.

the very title, false memory, evokes the instability of recollection and the fluidity of truth. in this series, the photographer plays with the nature of memory and its susceptibility to distortion. motifs echo and distort from one frame to the next—an element in one photograph becomes amplified, exaggerated, or inverted in the next. this technique disorients the viewer, prompting a confrontation with the unreliability of what we think we see and remember. at the same time, kv’s photographs gesture toward the great masters — monet’s haystacks, courbet’s earthy realism — while questioning the very idea of permanence in art and memory. bosnia, a land where history is constructed and reconstructed, offers a fertile ground for exploring how memory can be not only cultivated but also fabricated to shape narratives of division, identity, and belonging.

bob dylan, another nobel laureate, captures this duality of flow and stasis in his song watching the river flow, where he explores the existential tension between progress and inertia. he sings,
‘this ol’ river keeps on rollin’, though / no matter what gets in the way and which way the wind does blow / and as long as it does i’ll just sit here / and watch the river flow’.

for dylan, the river is an eternal constant, a cipher for time’s passage, a force indifferent to human endeavor or suffering. andrić, too, found in the river a symbol of continuity, a force that outlives the human conflicts it witnesses. kv, with his bosna series, extends this metaphor into the realm of perception and memory. the river’s flow, always changing yet fundamentally the same, becomes a metaphorical thread that links the land, the self, and the shared human experience.

the bosna, with its slow, deliberate passage through the landscape, becomes the perfect subject for kv’s philosophical exploration of time and truth. in this river, the soul of bosnia is reflected—its turbulent past, its fractured present, and its uncertain future, all mirrored in the flowing waters. kv’s false memory captures this complex interplay, offering a meditation on the fleeting nature of experience and the constructedness of memory. here, the river is not just a body of water; it is a liminal space, a boundary between past and present, between reality and illusion.

the series invites us to contemplate the impossibility of ever truly grasping the “objective” nature of reality, just as we cannot step into the same river twice. as the camera lens attempts to freeze a moment in time, it simultaneously acknowledges the futility of this endeavor. the river flows on, indifferent to human efforts to contain or define it, just as history flows beyond the reach of those who try to shape it. one might ask kv about the contradiction inherent in the title false memory — whether it is a critique of the camera’s promise of objectivity or a reflection on the inevitable subjectivity of the human gaze.

max dax, may 2023

the shape of memory

i photographed the sculpture on my first journey along the bosna after the war, more than 20 years ago. a life-sized figure, holding a machine gun, rising from a small village cemetery by the river.
i took the picture from the fence, reluctant to enter the cemetery, anxious about running into comrades or relatives. enemy territory.
over the years, i would always stop to take a picture, gradually moving closer, finding new angles, noticing details, changes. a simple wooden bench had been set up in front of the grave, and i thought of the parents who must come here, grieving their son. though the monument became part of the landscape, something familiar, i still felt uneasy, as if someone might appear to question my presence, or my intentions.
one winter’s day, the sculpture stood transformed, snow covering its head, the torso wrapped as if it were wearing a swan’s pelt.
i stood facing it, taking a picture at eye level for the first time, when i heard a car pull up behind me. a man walked solemnly up to the grave, holding thin yellow candles in his hand. he broke the silence commenting on the cold. his brother had returned from switzerland just before the war, he said. his residence papers had expired. then he was recruited. this is where he remains. standing guard over a memory refusing to fade.

in summer, i saw a sign reading “BOSNA” fastened to a tree by the river, marking a spot where people gathered in the evenings to party. i decided to come back and photograph it in winter, when the bare branches would make the sign stand out more.
when i returned, the tree was broken. the stem holding the sign had been bent, torn off and discarded in the field.
as i was setting up my camera on a tripod, a man appeared from the bushes and asked if i was hunting rabbits. dušan told me he was selling flowers at the markets and explained that this stretch of the river had run red with blood during WWII, that people had crossed the water walking over corpses instead of bridges.
perhaps i was hunting, with unexpected guides digging up rabbit holes in front of me.
i wonder what the river would call itself.

when i returned to my ancestors’ cemetery in winter, the graves lay under blankets of snow.
slowly giving in to the sun, their outlines softened. shapes rose and sank in the snow, breathing, time shifting the weight of memory.