25 years after the war in the former Yugoslavia, artist Anna Dasovic recalls the genocide with various projects.
They look at you in a long line along the Amsterdam quay: 25 young people, photographed in black and white, printed on huge panels. They are all Bosnian Dutch of 25 years old. The cards below show their first names and places of birth: Assen, Amsterdam, Prijedor, Srebrenica.
The lyrics are about how they or their parents ended up in the Netherlands, and how the war often still affects their lives. “Even after 25 years, not all missing persons have been found. Every year we bury someone who has been identified ”, says Merima from Amsterdam. Another woman says she feels disrespected if they “do not even dare to admit what injustice has been done to us”.
Dirty joke
The photo project is called “Temporary Monument: Srebrenica is Dutch History” and is the work of four Bosnian-Dutch women who together call themselves Bosnian Girl. That’s not as lighthearted as it sounds; the name refers to a poignant work of art from 2003. Bosnian artist Sejla Kameric then took a photo of himself and wrote lyrics on it: “No teeth ..? A mustache ..? Melt like shit ..? Bosnian girl! “. A Dutch soldier, one of the blue helmets, originally wrote the text on the wall of the UN base in Potocari, as a dirty joke that was especially not intended to get out.
That base was part of the enclave of Srebrenica, where Bosnian Serbs murdered 8,372 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in July 1995. The temporary photo monument is located on this quay in East Amsterdam because of the 25-year commemoration of the genocide. In addition, in the building of art space Framer Framed, there is more art on display that deals with the processing of the genocide. How does an image of what happened arise, how can images help to keep the memory alive, to reconstruct the past?
The exhibition is based on artist Anna Dasovic (Amsterdam, 1982), child of a Dutch mother and a father born in the former Yugoslavia. Earlier she reconstructed the destruction of the famous film roll on which Dutchbat had recorded evidence of places of execution at the Amsterdam Rijksakademie; thanks to the Government Information Act (Wob), she also discovered a second film from the same series with three unclear photos from the forest.
After four years of waiting, Dasovic recently got access to a hundred videotapes from the archives of the Dutch Ministry of Defense. These are recordings of exercises that Dutch UN soldiers did in Germany and Belgium in 1994 in preparation for their peacekeeping missions in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Role-playing games where “everything that could possibly arise” was practiced.
Some of the actors were soldiers who, having already been deployed, gave a physical translation of their impression of the Bosniaks when playing the scripts. In two films in the exhibition, Dasovic subtly shows how clichéd that impression was. She sometimes does this by only showing the dialogues, and sometimes with a combination of image and sound.
A second episode from Dasovic’s project is about the space on the base where the text about the Bosnian Girl was shown. In her video she shows the now abandoned space and asks questions out loud. “How can you understand this space?” The drawings on the walls, made by twenty-year-old soldiers, provide guidance. They are not artistic feats, but they do depict what occupied the men of the UN peacekeeping force Unprofor. Obscene pictures of course, but also, for example, a drawing of camels. Camels that, as Dasovic explains, directly refer to the swear word for Bosnian Muslims.
An exotic image
In an interview in the accompanying booklet, Dasovic tells that the Dutch military got an exotic image of the Bosnians. It became a war that had started “there”, instead of “here”, in Western Europe. That is why Dasovic thinks it is important to present himself as a Dutchman – it is a shame that the films are mainly subtitled in English only.
Another Dutch project in the exhibition is “Facing Srebrenica”, a search by Dutch academics for the many family photos that Dutchbat soldiers took during their stay in the enclave. Those photos don’t just show loved ones who have now passed away; they also provide access to memories and conversations that otherwise would not have taken place.
It is an accessible and at the same time layered exhibition that offers space for practical research, maps and reconstructions with implicit judgments about history. Even the building that contains the largest part of the exhibition has been specially made for the exhibition, something that you as a visitor do not immediately realize. Designed by architect (and Bosnian Girl) Arna Mackic, inspired by the Yugoslav World War II memorials built by President Tito between 1960 and 1990.
The famous photo of an emaciated prisoner in Prijedor is missing. Instead, the image comes up in Ana Hoffner’s restrained work “Transferred Memories – Embodied Documents”, which shows two female actors looking at images and telling what they see. They see barbed wire, ribs, open mouths. The viewer only sees the tears in their eyes.
“From what will we reassemble ourselves”, which can be seen for free at Framer Framed until January 3, 2021, the Temporary Monument can be seen at the Oranje-Vrijstaatkade in Amsterdam until October 19.
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The sung emotions of the Dutchbat commander
The fall of Srebrenica does not lend itself as a subject for an opera. Commander Karremans’ homecoming is. Huba de Graaff wrote the music for “De Lamp”. By writing music for Karremans she could empathize with him despite everything.
