Description
Building on calls to provincialise IR from Europe’s so-called peripheries and the wider aesthetic turn in international relations, this paper intervenes in the visual political economy of wartime sexual violence in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). In particular, it suggests that this visual political economy has produced its subjects as hyper-visible, with a marked “timelessness” to processes of witnessing (Hom 2018). The continued reproduction of this visual political economy shapes international ways of seeing, visioning, and knowing (war in) BiH. This paper examines three visual and performative interventions into the subject of wartime sexual violence by Bosnian artists and makers that speak back to this context: Lana Cmajcanin’s Trauma of the Crime (2005-2011), Jasmila Zbanić’s Grbavica, and Edina Husanović’s Holy Jolie. Situating these interventions in their temporal, social, and political contexts, the paper traces how each maker disrupts dominant modes of knowing in the visual political economy of wartime sexual violence. Adopting an orientation toward witnessing that negotiates between politics, silence and remembering, and the social and material struggles of survivors in the present, these makers gesture in a more complex process of bearing witness to trauma.
