Art and Memory in Practices of Commemorations After Mass Atrocities

About

What role do commemorations play in the construction of collective memory in places afflicted by extreme war violence? How do different forms of commemoration create or hinder inclusive remembrance of the violent past? What happens, for example, when a village cinema theatre becomes a place of torture and detention, and is then abandoned; keeping the traces of extreme violence and yielding only traumatic memories? The course investigates how such memories can be re-integrated within ordinary social life through commemorative practices, zooming in on several sites of extreme war atrocity in the post-Yugoslav spaces, and focusing on artistic and performative memory activism. The course will further examine various visually striking and virtual approaches to memory work, focusing on artists and citizen-viewers as actors who work to organize communal and broader mobilizations in reclaiming spaces of war atrocities as inclusive places of memory. With the specific post-Yugoslav focus, the course will be placed in a comparative context, discussing conflicting memory-scapes of extreme atrocities in Europe and elsewhere.

Course leader

Ana Dević is a curator based in Zagreb. She is interested in the possibilities of the exhibition genre, educational collaborative processes, and various cultural situations, in which “art and politics could not escape each other".

Target group

Summer School as School is an interdisciplinary education and art collaboration model designed for BA, MA and PhD students, artists, architects and researchers of visual arts, humanities and social sciences, political theory, art history and curatorial studies, architecture and design, and anyone with a keen interest in the subject area.

Fee info