Thesis Title:
‘Art and Reconciliation’ — Persistent Illusions: the History Museum of Bosnia and Hercegovina’s Role in the Strategic Curation and Memorialisation of Mass Atrocity, and Peacebuilding
Thesis Abstract:
The History Museum of Bosnia and Hercegovina occupies a unique position: it is a ‘national’ museum but one that receives no public funding because of post-war BiH’s dysfunctional politics. Left to navigate a landscape shaped by political fragmentation and contested memory, the museum has survived by carving out a new mission as a ‘living museum’ that aims to foster peace and reconciliation. This project seeks to explore how the Museum enacts this mission through its engagement with families that experienced child loss during the 1992-96 siege of Sarajevo.
It will focus on the permanent exhibition Sarajevo Memories, the story of children killed in the siege and their bereaved parents, to investigate how the Museum’s curatorial choices shape narratives of absence and loss. Drawing on Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory, it explores how intergenerational transmission of trauma – especially in the absence of the ‘second generation’ – informs both family memory and the Museum’s strategies of memorialisation. By centring the Museum’s role, the project asks how institutional practices mediate personal and collective memory, and how these processes contribute to reconciliation and public engagement with Bosnia and Herzegovina’s difficult past.
Primary Supervisor:
Prof James Gow