pop-mitic

Massacres begin at home

Serbian artist Darinka Pop-Mitic’s installation at the 11th International Istanbul Biennial questions the relationship between peaceful homes and the sites of massacres during the war in Yugoslavia

Entering Serbian artist Darinka Pop-Mitic’s installation, one finds the artist relaxing on an armchair in what looks like a living room decorated with ornate wallpaper and landscape paintings. This seemingly peaceful environment is used by Pop-Mitic to reveal how these spaces served as the incubators of massacres committed during the war in Yugoslavia.

"The newspaper clippings, chairs, wallpapers – you need to see them as a whole," said Pop-Mitic. She explained that the landscapes were of places where massacres had occurred during the war that tore apart the former Yugoslavia. "Ordinary landscapes contrast with the subtitles below the paintings," she said.

Pop-Mitic had worked for a newspaper that published readers’ love letters. "Newspapers reuse images," she said, adding, "I used these landscapes of places where massacres had occurred, like Srebrenica, to illustrate those love letters." Srebrenica saw the July, 1995 massacre of more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys, as well as the ethnic cleansing of more than 25,000 refugees in that region of Bosnia and Herzegovina by units of the Bosnian Serb Army, or VRS, during the Bosnian War.

"We say that the war in Yugoslavia was constructed from ‘little lies at home.’ And this is a reconstruction of a petit-bourgeois salon," Pop-Mitic said. She added that the installation looked like a generic "grandma’s living room," a space where people would feel comfortable enough to voice opinions that they would not say outside the home, as they would be considered racist. "People would meet and discuss politics. In this environment, you can hear these kinds of [racist] things," she said.

Pop-Mitic said the pressure in Yugoslavia, due to this closeted racism, had started building up in the 1980s "and it exploded in the 1990s." "So the installation is about the ‘home lies’ that started the war," she said.

Although Pop-Mitic handles the subject of massacres, her method does not involve the exhibition of blood and gore. Doing otherwise, she believes, would be an irresponsible exploitation of the subject. "After the fall of Slobodan Milošević, things settled down but they are still not very calm," she said. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia charged former Yugoslavian President Milošević with crimes against humanity and alleged genocide for his role during the wars in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo. He died of a heart attack during his lengthy trial at the Hague in 2006.

"Artists use images from the massacres, the blood and gore," Pop-Mitic said. "But they should be more responsible. I wanted to avoid the anesthetization of death."

"I wanted to investigate the relationship between home and crime," she said, explaining that if images are taken out of context, then meaning is conceived differently. Added Pop-Mitic, "This is what the visual arts are about."

http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/n.php?n=the-contrast-between-home-and-crime-2009-09-11