FADIL ŠARKI

Profesional photographer

REFUGES. The paths of despair

DATE 2015

Fadil is an artist chronicler, an invisible companion of people who go through the huge dramas of life, such as the last wave of migrants that passed through our country. And among those “humiliated and offended”, there are those even more humiliated, the most sensitive and the most tragic group among them – children.

Fadil Sarki was staying with migrant groups, getting to know them, helping them, skipping the barrier of language, fear and distrust, but at the same time being an unobtrusive presence. Fadil was chronicling events in those terrible and fateful times, and made hundreds of valuable photographs which are both documents and art at the same time.

Among those works are the ones that focus on children – who are often unaware of the tragedy they endure, and who, despite the dire conditions in which they try to survive, still remain children – with their smile of confidence and recognition of kindness in the eyes and the face of the artist-observer and with their openness and purity that the world has not yet managed to pollute.

Fadil Sarki creates a moment of trust for them, but does not embellish the world in which he finds them; on the contrary, he puts before us images that we wanted to avoid seeing, even unconsciously devising strategies so we don’t fully face what is happening, lest we remain without of peaceful sleep, with our justifications that “we did not know” or “did not see”.

BILJANA SRBLJANOVIC Text at the opening of the THE PATHS OF DESPAIR exhibition 10 Dec 2018