So, on behalf of my country and from the bottom of my heart
2019
Mixed media installation
Video 11”00, text works 3 x 38 x 76 cm, annotations with Indian ink
Courtesy of the artist
On 11 July 2015, Dasović attended the burial of the remains of 136 people in Potočari, a town located in Republika Srpska, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Burials such as these are an annual event, commemorating the genocide that took place in Srebrenica in July 1995. The remains laid to rest are those that have been excavated from mass grave sites over the course of the preceding year. In some cases, remains are found dispersed over primary, secondary and tertiary mass graves. It is the only annually televised mass funeral in the world.
In 2015, the burial assembly marked the 20th anniversary of the genocide. Dasović’s work So, on behalf of my country and from the bottom of my heart brings together images of the burial from news media, found mobile phone footage, and video material that Dasović shot with her own phone.
Dasović’s montage traces the movements of Bill Clinton and Aleksander Vučić, former US President and Serbian Prime Minister, now Serbian president, respectively. In 1995, Vučić had been a member of the ultranationalist Serbian SRS party, and to this day he still refuses to publicly acknowledge the genocide. Clinton’s narrative framing of the genocide’s victims during the anniversary in 2015 reproduces the gaze of the its perpetrators. He urged the audience to treasure Vučić’s presence at the burial ceremony. One of the most repeated of his pernicious claims, performed as an emotional slippage, is that the people of Srebrenica allowed themselves to be killed for something. The popular protest that erupted during the commemoration was quelled by security forces and by the response of a Muslim community leader, who asked that people remain focused on the work of mourning. Relatives that attend these annual burial assemblies—many of them survivors of the massacre—find the space for their political dissent atrophied and their grief marginalised.
Artist’s Bio:
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. She asks: What ideological narratives do representations of violence participate in on a structural level? What forms of trauma are such documents unable to cope with, either in the legislative arena or when constitutive of the archive? Here, the archive serves both as a physical place for these documents and a metaphor of collective humiliation and remorse.