Milica Tomić

In July 1995, Bosnian Serb forces descended on Srebrenica—previously declared a “safe area” for Bosnia’s muslim population by the United Nations—and forcibly expelled approximately 30,000 women and children, before systematically executing at least 8,000 men and boys. Many of these bodies were then exhumed and reburied in secondary and tertiary mass graves to obscure the scale of the killings. This took place under the eyes of NATO and Dutch peacekeepers, yet so many questions remain. In the thirty years since, the identities of Srebrenica’s victims and perpetrators have often been flattened to serve politically expedient ethno-national narratives, so that even in acts of commemoration, those who lost their lives are once again denied their humanity, reduced instead to ideological markers.

Milica Tomić questions how one can hold the memory of such massacres without perpetuating fresh violence. Together with scholars, artists, and activists, she formed Grupa Spomenik, which engages with the theory of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan to explore the conditions under which art and theory can produce its own discourse on genocide and the contemporary state of permanent war. Tomić’s installation couples Grupa Spomenik’s Mathemes of Re-association (2008), a Lacanian analysis of the Srebrenica massacre, with Portrait of MM (1999), a film she shot after NATO’s bombardment of Belgrade. The artist records a meeting with her mother, the Yugoslavian actress Marija Milutinović, who, in her later years, began creating large abstract textile works using macramé, a knotting technique that traces back to ancient Assyria. Tomić responds to the form of the knot, as it appears within both her mother’s practice and in Lacanian theory, as a vehicle for subjectivities that can slip from the scripts of national trauma.

Text: Kate Sutton