The Gun in the Room – Muhamed Kafedžić
Chekhov’s Gun, a principle of writing and storytelling, states: “If a gun appears in a scene, it must eventually be fired.” I believe this applies to real life as well.
In 2022–2023, I lived in the USA, in Ithaca, NY. I was there accompanying my wife. We were with our kids, who were ten and twelve at the time. Before that, we had lived abroad as a family in 2016, in Tokyo, Japan — our most beautiful collective experience. It fueled me to paint for the next five years.
The US experience was the polar opposite for me. From day one, we were greeted by a post-COVID, post-Trump society that often spoke in harsh, threatening, formal language. Cornell University and Ithaca College seemed drenched in gatekeeping academic culture. The humanities are now often perceived as hobbies. STEM is glorified, especially when research is funded by the military and brings money to the university. The humanities are treated the same way, if you can somehow sell mindfulness, non-violence, peace education, or confronting history to the military — a few academics do, but mostly they don’t.
After six months of trying to connect with local academia, I gave up. For the record: in 2008, within only 24 hours at Cornell, I met more professors than I did during 2022–2023. Luckily, we had friends from before who were like family, and I succeeded in showing in two group exhibitions, had one solo, joined a street art project, and connected with a small community of artists — my art family in Ithaca.
In January 2023, my daughter told us they would have seven days of drills for a “school shooting” response. I felt mortified. I started researching the topic and opened the door to American gun culture. When I tried to speak about this with my American friends, after a few minutes, I would be shut down with something like, “This is how it is, and nothing can be done.” “Yes, we can” and “this is not acceptable” have been quietly exchanged for resignation. To my utmost terror, we then heard news about a school shooting in Belgrade, Serbia. I started digging. The number of school shootings and gun violence in the United States is not comparable to the rest of the world, especially to countries with stable democratic systems.
The first problem is easy access to guns and munitions (profit-driven). The second is isolation and over-medication (again, profit-driven). The third is exposure to an unhealthy amount of misinformation through social media (profit-driven). All of this is enabled by deregulation or a lack of regulation. For example, after the Uvalde school shooting (with 22 dead and 18 injured in 2022), only one person was prosecuted — a girl in Germany whom the shooter had spoken online to beforehand, and she replied “cool”. She was later found guilty of failing to report planned crimes in Germany.
As someone who has put his faith in people, I felt sick to my bones. While painting a mural in Ithaca, a man in a Ford truck shouted at me, and after I tried unsuccessfully to communicate with him, I decided to turn my back and continue working. It was the only time I felt afraid that someone might be carrying a concealed weapon and that I might be shot on the street. I didn’t feel that kind of fear anywhere I had painted murals before. Even when I had trouble with ultras in Italy, nasty dog owners in Belgium, or when I attended a counter-protest (anti-Nazi) in Berlin, I never felt such fear.
On my return home in Sarajevo, I was deeply shaken and unable to continue painting cherry blossoms. Everywhere I looked in the media, I could see this dark poison being spilled over—more and more news of gun violence in Europe. When I spoke with high school students, I saw that no one was working with them on these topics. Many had been playing GTA and similar games in primary school, encouraged by their fathers or allowed by their mothers to keep them quiet. We put a tank-based memorial in the park next to the city’s prominent high school. We also had a huge billboard promoting birthday parties for young kids at “Warzone Center” in post-war Sarajevo, a place that simulates a real warzone experience. Some teachers were even taking their classes there for team-building. I felt dead inside. I lost my faith in humanity. All I saw was darkness.
After I came back, my friend Amer Hadžić invited me to join Arka – Art & Education Center and to “just start painting.” I had already begun thinking about a new series triggered by American gun culture, but I was resisting the urge to “paint it black.” In the last fifteen years, I may have used a liter of black paint. I treated black as rare. My nights were always Prussian blue. Now I could only imagine large paintings on pitch-black surfaces. Of course, I was financially exhausted and lacked materials and a studio. I also met my friends, Giorgio and Mario from ARCI Chieti, and people from Zdravo-da-ste and the Center for Environment in Banja Luka — their work restored my faith in ordinary people. I helped my wife with her UNESCO peace education project, which also gave me hope.
“Just come and paint,” Amer kept repeating. The work in Arka became my solid ground. Soon, I received a grant from the Ministry of Culture and Sports of Sarajevo Canton that partially covered my material expenses.
To separate this series from my usual Pop Art / Ukiyo-e paintings, instead of a persona, I let my shadow loose — I developed Minotaur Rex, a monster lurking in the darkness. When I painted the first piece in the series, my energy was released, and soon I began painting my Japanesque works again. Apart from painting, I started writing project proposals, organizing workshops, and exhibitions. I was back to my old self, but now I also had a way to express my melancholy and infinite sadness, as well as anger and rage. And I had a new studio/gallery/workshop — a new home at Arka.
I hope This Is A®merica will not be just another series of paintings. I hope it will change the way we approach gun culture and play an active role in preventing such cultures from developing in our own and other countries.
Muhamed Kafedžić
Sarajevo, 29 August 2025
Gun Violence Archive tracks every gun incident in the U.S