BEFORE THE FALL THERE WAS NO FALL. EPISODE 2: SURFACES
SYNOPSIS
Episode 02: Surfaces' traces murals and drawings of Dutch Blue Helmets in the ‘UN Safe Area Srebrenica’ in Bosnia and Herzegovina 25 years later. How did the hands of Dutch soldiers touch the surfaces of their military compound in Srebrenica? What can these marks tell us about the culture of a Dutch male military doctrine, conceptualised by its soldiers on the walls in Srebrenica? How to understand these images in the presence of the dead?
BIOGRAPHY
Anna Dasović’s artistic practice is focused on the rhetorical structures that make genocidal violence visible, and those deployed to obscure the politically inconvenient aspects of such conflicts. What are representations of violence intended to communicate despite their original intentions? What ideological narratives do such representations participate in on a structural level? The production and use of (visual) documents are examined in their quest for truth finding or the social and/or political perceptions they seek to form, while simultaneously exposing their legislative and archival inability to cope with trauma caused by violence. Here, the archive serves both as a physical place for these documents and a metaphor of collective humiliation and remorse. Central to her work is an exploration into the figure of the bystander and the ways in which the unimaginable and the unrepresentable—categories produced by the discourse on genocide—are evoked to refute the responsibility of witnessing violence. Dasović is interested in that rejection and in the exclusion of knowledge that is held in the body but denied by society’s authorizing structures.
