Anna Dasovic: 'grounds for denial'

 
The work grounds for denial is based on fieldwork in several towns in Republika Sprska, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Dasovic visited these places to study how public space is increasingly shaped by representations of Serbian nationalism. One example is Foca, a small community home to many Serbian veterans; in Visegrad, another place, Russian volunteers fought alongside the Serbian Army, and the municipality ordered a monument commemorating the genocide of Bosniaks to be vandalized. In these places, graffiti, murals, and defaced monuments both symbolize the denial of the genocidal violence that occurred in the 1990s. In addition, they mythologize the political project of ‘Greater Serbia'. In this presentation, Dasovic draws a clear relationship between these two tendencies.

‘Grounds for denial' is a juridical term that refers to the underlying reasons to deny a claim. Dasovic uses this term as a metaphor for historical revisionism: that history, as it is usually told, is not accurate and can be subject to alteration. grounds for denial specifically refers to the growing historical revisionism that seeks to deny the systematic genocide of the Bosniak population of Bosnia and Herzegovina, as established by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague.
 
In grounds for denial, Dasovic registered the public spaces that she traversed during her fieldwork in the summer of 2022. The documented images appear ordinary: they are relatively flat and unsophisticated in their visual rhetoric. Yet by drawing attention to these public sites, Dasovic unravels the underlying structures of a continuing genocidal act. This act is often understood as being confined to a historical period in the mid-1990s, yet is actually very much active in the present. For example, the link some of the images filmed produce between Russian nationalism and Serbian nationalism is based on an understanding of a white, Orthodox political entity that justifies the violence against Bosniaks—in the past, but also in the future. These public sites reify the idea that Bosnian Serb society is ethnically heterogeneous and politically unaligned with the EU and NATO.
 
grounds for denial raises questions about the work that is necessary to animate cultures of denial, but also asks whether and how it is possible to represent something that is structurally erased.

03 Sep '22 - 16 Oct '22
Stroom Den Haag, Hogewal 1-9, The Hague
Entrance: free