Description
During and after the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina (1992-1995), survivors of wartime sexual violence became highly visible. At this time, survivor testimony was highly coveted by internationals actors who sought to demonstrate that rape was being used systematically as a weapon of war. Testimony has also been key to the recognition of sexual violence as a weapon of war and, it was hoped, also a process of restoring dignity to survivors. Since the end of the war, the issue of wartime sexual violence has oscillated between moments of societal silence and hyper-visibility. In this context, survivors face significant and evolving social, political, and material challenges. However, in dominant discourse, there is a marked timelessness, “the absence of change or passing” (Hom 2018, 309), to forms of witnessing wartime sexual violence. Building on the aesthetic turn in international relations, this paper examines three artistic interventions into the subject of wartime sexual violence in Bosnia-Herzegovina: Lana Cmajcanin’s Trauma of the Crime (2005-2011), Jasmila Zbanić’s Grbavica, and Edina Husanović’s Holy Jolie. Through a critical engagement with each artwork, the paper demonstrates how each disrupts dominant temporalities of witnessing. In doing so, the artists reveal that our response to wartime sexual violence must, by necessity, evolve through time. In this sense, witnessing is positioned both as a process of asserting the “veracity of the past”, as well as “building anew its linkages to […] the present-day life of subjects” (Laub 1992, 76). Witnessing is an ongoing process of negotiation between memory, politics, and the significations of wartime sexual violence over time.
