BB: The Aestheticisation and Memorialisation of the 1992 Atrocities Committed in Prijedor

This lecture explores the aestheticisation and memorialisation of the 1992 atrocities committed in Prijedor, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Drawing on artworks that confront ethnic cleansing, it examines how creative practices serve not merely as imaginative products but as responses to historical violence. Through photography, literature, monuments, and other media, these works function as witnesses of past events, commemorative practices, and instruments of memory politics. They offer sensory experiences that mobilise both individual reflection and collective political action, keeping the voices of the silenced present in public memory.

Petra Hamer (1988) is an ethnologist and cultural anthropologist interested in popular music and culture in Southeastern Europe during the 20th and 21st centuries. She holds a PhD from the University of Graz, where she researched the production of popular music by Bosnian and Herzegovinian army artistic units, focusing on the question of national identity construction in a multi-ethnic society. Currently, she works as a postdoctoral researcher on the ERC project DEAGENCY № 101095729, researching the role of the dead in the lives of individuals in contemporary Bosnian and Herzegovinian society, with a focus on mass graves, political changes, and violence.