Claremont, CA—The Benton Museum of Art is pleased to announce the opening of Sahara: Acts of Memory, the museum’s first exhibition devoted solely to graphic design. Sahara—on view from November 11, 2021 through February 27, 2022—features the work of the graphic designer Amir Berbić, who uses design to give new life to the story of his family’s experience at Sahara, a refugee camp in Denmark, in the early 1990s. Amir’s work traces and memorializes that of his father, Ismet Berbić, also a graphic designer who had used design to give this refugee camp an identity that instilled a sense of dignity for himself and the other residents. Through a process of mining his own memory and revisiting his family’s history, Amir developed new designs for Sahara, presented here alongside historical documents about life at the refugee camp. For the opening on November 11, guest curator Karen Kice and Amir Berbić will give a gallery talk about the exhibition.
In 1993, during the war in Bosnia, the Berbić family fled their home in Sarajevo, ultimately arriving at a refugee camp in Næsbyhoved-Broby, Denmark. Shortly after arriving at the camp, Ismet set out on a project to brand the camp. He named it “Sahara”—an ironic gesture referring to the sandy ground on which their tents were constructed, in marked contrast to the Danish countryside around them—and set about creating an identity and claiming the camp for his family and their fellow refugees. In a makeshift design studio in the corner of the tent his family shared with two other families, Ismet created a logo for the camp and nameplates for the tents that housed the residents. His work as a graphic designer gave the camp an identity and helped residents to reclaim what they had lost, starting with their own names. Ismet and his wife, Hika, also organized a school for the children that was recognized by the Bosnian government. Their efforts were instrumental in establishing a community among the refugees.
When faced with images of Syrian refugees fleeing their country in 2015, Amir began reflecting on his own childhood experience as a refugee. Over the next several years, Amir developed a new understanding of his family’s time in Denmark through a new version of Sahara—a new logo, a series of posters, and textbook covers—created with and alongside his father’s original designs.
Sahara: Acts of Memory occupies two galleries. In the first, Amir explores life at the refugee camp, presenting newspaper articles, a TV interview, a schematic outline of the interior of the tent where the family lived, original drawings that his father created at the refugee camp, and ephemera about the camp from the Berbić family’s personal collection. Amir’s designs fill the second gallery. His work is a testament to his father’s work as well as the story of how Sahara shaped his family’s experience, demonstrating the multivalent power of design. This exhibition ultimately illuminates the power of graphic design to suggest new ways of perceiving and living in the world, and it also reminds us of the discipline’s ability to give form to concepts, ideas, and memories. Through Amir’s work, Sahara endures.
The exhibition is accompanied by a publication that elaborates upon Amir’s designs, the Berbić family’s refugee story, and the identity project by Ismet. In the lead essay, curator Karen Kice discusses how Ismet and Amir used design as an expansive tool and contextualizes their work within design history. She also touches on how design typically addresses basic needs such as shelter in refugee communities, while Sahara responds to emotional needs such as identity and dignity. Reflections by Joanne Nucho, assistant professor of anthropology at Pomona College, and Wendy Pearlman, professor of political science at Northwestern University, provide insights into the dynamics of refugee communities today. The catalogue also includes an oral history by the Berbić family that expands upon their experience as refugees and chronicles how this project impacted their lives.
About the Artist
Amir Berbić is a graphic designer, educator, and dean of Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts in Qatar. His work focuses on identities of place and design pedagogy. After leaving Sahara, he and his family immigrated to Chicago, where he received a BFA in graphic design from the University of Illinois at Chicago and an MFA in visual communication from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He was a professor and chair of graphic design at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) as well as associate dean for faculty affairs in the UIC College of Architecture, Design, and the Arts (2014–2019) and acting director of the UIC School of Design (2016–2017). He was also on the AIGA Chicago Board of Directors, serving as vice president and co-chair of education from 2015 to 2018. He collaborates with cultural organizations, art institutions, and publishers on commissions that range from print design to environmental graphics. His work, writing, and teaching output have been featured in numerous academic and professional publications, conferences, and exhibitions, including Design Issues, Visual Communication, Print, Graphis, Wallpaper, ICOGRADA World Design Congress, AIGA Design Educators Conference, TypeCon, Society of Typographic Arts, and Salone del Mobile in Milan. Amir’s work is held in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.
About the Curator
Karen Kice is a curator and consultant in art, architecture, and design. She has conceived, developed, and managed projects including major exhibitions and events in a range of diverse environments from museums to public spaces. Her projects skillfully distill complex ideas and theories into a concise and digestible manner for broad audiences through various modes of dissemination. Her exhibitions include Recurrent Visions: The Architecture of Marshall Brown Projects (Princeton University School of Architecture, 2019), Chatter: Architecture Talks Back (Art Institute of Chicago, 2015), and Building: Inside Studio Gang Architects (Art Institute of Chicago, 2012). She is the co-editor of the forthcoming publication Recurrent Visions: The Architecture of Marshall Brown Projects (Princeton Architectural Press, 2022). For five years, she was a curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at the Art Institute of Chicago, where she created over a dozen exhibitions looking at how contemporary forces shape architecture and design.
About the Benton Museum of Art
Now housed in the new Benton Museum of Art designed by Machado Silvetti and Gensler, Pomona College’s collection of art numbers 16,000 objects, including Italian Renaissance paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation; works on paper, including a first edition print series by Francisco Goya given by Norton Simon; and works in various media produced in Southern California in the twentieth century. In keeping with Pomona College’s reputation as a leading center of the visual arts, the collection also includes works by such esteemed alumni as Chris Burden ’69, Marcia Hafif ’51, Helen Pashgian ’56, Peter Shelton ’73, and James Turrell ’65. Recognized globally for its commitment to contemporary art, the museum is the home of The Project Series, which has featured more than 50 contemporary Southern California artists since it began in 1999. Through its collaboration with students and faculty, the museum encourages active learning and creative exploration across all disciplines of study within the liberal arts context.