Pascal Convert

At its core, the work of visual artist, writer and director Pascal Convert (b. 1957, Mont-de-Marsan, France) deals with memory and forgetfulness. He has published several books about Nazi resistance, created the Monument à la mémoire des otages fusillés au Mont-Valérien entre 1941 et 1944 (2003) and also worked at archaeological sites destroyed for ideological reasons in Afghanistan and Armenia. The Pietà du Kosovo (1999-2000) is one of a set of three sculptures made between 1999 and 2003. These sculptures were inspired by famous press photographs carefully selected by Convert both for their iconographic strength and for the events they depict. The artist highlights the symbolic power of these images and examines their political, aesthetic and cultural aspects, as well as how they impact memory construction and historical amnesia. For this piece, he used a photograph by Georges Mérillon (b. 1957, Talence, France), taken in the village of Nagafc in Kosovo on January 28, 1990, at the very start of the war between Serbia and Kosovo. The picture, later renamed La Pietà du Kosovo, was taken during the funeral wake of Nasimi Elshani, a young man who had been killed by Serbian police the previous day. When discussing this picture, the artist highlighted the ambiguous nature of representation: ‘What we saw was this mimic of western Christian painting archetypes, a photograph that reproduced the pictorial stereotypes of compassion. We refused to see its otherness, when in fact this image did not depict the death of Christ but a Sunni Muslim funeral rite.’