TRAUMA AND IDENTITY: MEDIALISATION AND CONSTRUCT (original) (raw)
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Modernist Tropes and Post-Socialist Realities in Commemoration of the Second World War in Croatia
Massen Sterben. Wege des Erinnerns an zwei Weltkriege aus Europäischer Perspektive / Masses are dying. Ways of Remembrance of the World Wars from a European Perspective, 2021
Second World War brought unrest, division and violence in Croatia. Foreign occupation was accompanied by inner conflict, traditionally described as ideological schism between fascist and anti-fascist forces. Although there is no agreement whether it is comparable with Spanish civil war, one thing is sure: it led to tens of thousands of military and civilian victims, perished in concentration camps or prisons and in post-war retaliations. Communist authorities of the Yugoslav period very soon turned the local acts of commemoration into official rituals, nation-building narratives and aestheticization of traumas. During 1950s the ineffability of traumatic experiences was confronted with the quest for Modernist artistic expression. It can be seen as a symptom of systemic denial of original, disturbing authorities, testifying to collective traumas, that is also traceable in the removal of wartime ruins. I will therefore analyse the strategies of representation of mass atrocities in Modernist monuments created since the 1960s in communist Croatia and problems of their comprehension after 1990. It leads to discussion of the phenomena of denial, dissimulation and vandalism, manifested in protected ecosystems of Croatian islands and natural parks, contaminated both by war crimes on civilians and by post-war retributions over the defeated military forces.
IKON, 2018
In this paper iconoclasm is understood in the broader sense, as abandoning and rejecting the old subjects and forms in the totalitarian framework of the politically motivated directing and controlling of the visual arts. In the period of Socialist Realism we notice an intention for the creation of a ‘totalitarian’ mentality or collective ‘trance’ rather than only pressure or censorship in the art field (Briski Uzelac); we recognise attempts to influence the collective ‘unconscious’, to automate consciousness and shape it according to the desired mould (Groys). Political elites realized that visual arts have great importance in creating such a collective trance: the task of every artist is to visualize key ideas of the ideological discourse and to translate them into the language of art (Briski Uzelac). This paper will discuss the official, politically directed, Croatian art criticism, which worked as one of the important mediums for the transfer of the Socialist Realist ideology ("the Party line") both to the artists and their audience, and its dicursive strategies aimed at achieving the desirable and ‘correct’ subject matter and stylistics in the period of Socialist Realism (1945–1950). The discourse of art criticism functioned through the system of binary oppositions, where every desirable phenomenon has its forbidden or stigmatized mirror image. This paper focuses on these oppositions, based on the most important categories of the evaluation apparatus criteria: form, subject and content.
Performing Identity After Yugoslavia: Contemporary Art Beyond and Through the Ethno-National
This project suggests readings of contemporary performative artworks from the South Slavic region that look beyond the ethno-national identity of the artist to examine intersectional identities in play, expressions of war memory and trauma, and repudiations of the often essentializing gaze of the international art market on artists currently working in the post-Yugoslav space. While issues of ethno-nationalism are certainly a part of identity construction in post-Yugoslav society, and a result of the identity politics of the globalized art world that these artists entered into after the end of socialism in Eastern Europe, it is reductive to relegate the works thusly without addressing the intersectional nature of both self- and social-identities. Whether rejecting or reifying signifiers of identity from the Yugoslav period, recalling family histories and traditions, celebrating or lamenting reinvigorated religious practices, or examining hybrid cultures and life in the diaspora¬– the performative practices of artists from the South Slavic region are indicators of the identity work being taken on by the artists themselves, as well as their publics. This project proposes a methodology that could be employed to study the contemporary art production of regions that do not have a unifying culture, but that have been understood to have a monolithic cultural identity by the essentializing gaze of the art world in the former West.
Branislava Anđelković / Branislav Dimitrijević THE FINAL DECADE: ART, SOCIETY, TRAUMA AND NORMALITY • O Normalnosti – Umetnost u Srbiji, 1989-2001, (w B. Andjelković and D. Sretenović), Museum of Contemporary Art, Beograd, 2005. , 2005
The Bosnian Case: Art, History and Memory
2018
The Bosnian Case: Art, History and Memory concerns the representation of historic and traumatogenic events in art through the specific case of the war in Bosnia 1992-1995. The research investigates an aftermath articulated through the Freudian concept of Nachträglichkeit, rebounding on the nature of representation in the art as always in the space of an "afterness". The ability to represent an originary traumatic scenario has been questioned in the theoretics surrounding this concept. Through The Bosnian Case and its art historical precedents, the research challenges this line of thinking, identifying, including through fieldwork in Bosnia in 2016, the continuation of the war in a war of images.
In the post-Yugoslav context, works of contemporary art as well as literature, especially when they deal with genocide and radical violence, face a problem not unlike Adorno’s famous stance about the impossibility of writing poetry after Auschwitz. Nevertheless when talking about memory (anti)culture in the post-Yugoslav space, a creative and socially productive role should be attested to post-Yugoslav art and literature, which since the early 1990s has offered a well-articulated critique of memory practices of the 1991–1999 wars in ex-Yugoslavia as well as critically addressed the rewriting of historical narratives and offered resistance to the dominant state building and ethnocentric memory politics. Since the formation of the national capitalistic states, the official memory politics of – I dare to claim – all post-Yugoslav countries has gone hand in hand with nationalism, racism, and the evacuation and erasure of memory aspects which cannot be used as a retro- or prospective legitimating tool of a (mono)national, neoliberal and capitalist way of being. This paper aims to discuss some of the critical positions towards the process of ethno-national evacuation and fragmentarisation of memory of the 1991–1999 wars within contemporary art in the post-Yugoslav context. By doing so I hope not only to outline selected positions by contemporary post-Yugoslav artists towards the 1991–1999 wars in ex-Yugoslavia and their aftermath but also to critically contextualise national memory politics and a neoliberal process of neutralisation and evacuation of memory aspects and, in particular, the depoliticising efforts of this process.
COLLOQUIA HUMANISTICA, 2018
The main aim of this overview is to trace the presence and importance of Yugoslav narrative (dedicated to a common cultural and artistic space before, during and after Yugoslavia) as important for (re)creating and maintaining continuity and coherence in the core narrative as an internal structure of cultural institutions in Serbia, especially in the transition period (2000 – 2018). The emergence of the South Slavic unity idea in the territory of the Balkans, as we argue in the paper, can be traced to a time long before the state of Yugoslavia was created as a concept. The fact that a common field (common ground) in the sense of cultural space existed long before the creation of Yugoslavia contains the assumption that a common cultural ground and art space exist in the postYugoslav period as well. The concept of the common cultural space is also known as the Yugoslav Artistic Space. The main goal of the paper is to form the conclusion that the Yugoslav Artistic Space, considering its tradition, still exists despite the political changes after 1989, particularly during the 1990s and the transition process, if not in another sense then as a core narrative of institutions (such as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade, for example). The paper also offers the thesis that marginalization of the Yugoslav legacy leads to discontinuity, fragmentation, and a status quo position in the transition process of Serbian cultural institutions.
Anglica Wratislaviensia, 2023
This paper explores the "lost language" of monuments erected in the former Yugoslavia from the 1960s to the 1980s-more precisely, the 25 national monuments captured by the lens of photographer Jan Kempenaers over the span of three years (2006−2009), and published in the monograph Spomenik [Monument] (2010). By combining the approach of cognitive linguistics and cultural studies, in particular that of Forceville ("Identification", "Metaphor", "Agendas"), Kövecses (Culture, Context), Ortiz, and Kirn and Burghardt, this paper aims to explore the conceptual metaphors embedded in these monuments as part of a specifi c symbolic landscape, immanent to the countries of the former Yugoslavia at a historical point of their four-decades-long political, social, and cultural merger, as well as the current possibilities and limitations of the visual/multimodal decodification of the memorials.