Architectural installation © Eva Broekema

Temporary monument by Bosnian Girl © Maarten Nauw

Temporary monument by Bosnian Girl © Robert Glas

Architectural installation © Robert Glas

Framer Framed

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From what will we reassemble ourselves

A group exhibition in Framer Framed conceived by Anna Dasović and curated by Natasha Marie Llorens. Exhibition design by Studio L A.

From what will we reassemble ourselves brings together six contemporary artists, a team of researchers, and an architect to consider a crucial question posed by Croatian-Bosnian author Jozefina Dautbegović: from what fragments – images, stories, archives, historical scraps – does one represent a life in the wake of genocide? The artworks and research presented take a long view of the representation of genocidal violence.

From what will we reassemble ourselves includes the pre-image, or what was known about a people through the way they were historically represented. The unquestioned question that names the exhibition, From what will we reassemble ourselves, positions the artwork and research presented within the context of the genocide that took place in and around Srebrenica, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 25 years ago. If genocide is a spectrum of effects rather than an event, what does the act of looking at this spectrum entail in the Netherlands? Which histories of colonial imagery are called upon – consciously and unconsciously – to render the people that belong to it? What can we remember with the pieces that are available to a viewer in the Netherlands, and how might the structure of that memory itself be rethought if it were to include the pieces of people from there, or elsewhere?

Studio L A designed the exhibition by adding an architectural installation in which the artworks are shown. Arna Mačkić: “Tens of thousands of Bosnians who fled the war live in the Netherlands. Like myself. Just like other Bosnians, I have my own memories, images and perspectives from the war. For many years, these memories remained untouched, because it was necessary to focus on progress and building a future in the Netherlands. But the memories had not disappeared, they were always between the walls, always around me, ready to be broken open. The exhibition design is a representation of these walls. The visitor is invited to move ‘between the wall’ and to focus on – in parts that have been broken open – other perspectives as yet untold.

The visitor finds themselves in a narrow corridor connecting five archetypal rooms. The exhibition design obliquely references my research into Bogdan Bogdanović’s public monuments in order to make tangible Yugoslavia’s formal attempts to mourn its own violent pasts. The monuments designed by Bogdanović lack any symbolism of political ideology, war heroes, or religion. Bogdanović sought symbolism in abstract and archaic forms in order to connect people across difference. The design plan’s conceptual intention is to render palpable how difficult the history of the Bosnian territories is to access from the Netherlands today.”

Seen from the exterior, the exhibition design is abstract and monolithic, like its formal referent. Inside, the viewer is confronted with isolated containers for each work, producing a forced intimacy and preventing an overview of the whole exhibition. The impossibility of understanding everything at once mirrors the compartmentalisation of memory of the violence that the exhibition seeks to address and deconstruct.

Srebrenica is Dutch History
Twenty-five years after the genocide in Srebrenica there is still no national monument in the Netherlands to commemorate this tragedy. In response to this lack, Bosnian Girl collective erected a Temporary Monument on Het Plein in The Hague on 11 July 2020, in front of the building where the Dutch government is seated, as part of their ‘Srebrenica is Dutch History’ campaign for the 25th-year commemoration of the genocide in Srebrenica. It will travel to Amsterdam and be shown outside Framer Framed in Amsterdam from 6th September to 19th October to coincide with the opening of the exhibition From what will we reassemble ourselves.