Artists at War

In Artists at War Ewa Kumelowski gives us a thorough and well-grounded insight into the specificities of artistic life in Sarajevo before and during the 1992 - 1996 siege. The book is a fascinating and thoughtful exploration of the nexus of art, resistance and place. It offers a unique look at how artists shaped and reshaped mechanisms of survival against mechanisms of destruction, highly recommended --Sabina Tanovic, Delft University of Technology, Netherlands) Introducing a unique cultural community, this book follows the lives of Sarajevan visual artists as they respond to the rising instability and political fragmentation during the last days of Yugoslavia’s existence, and its eventual dissolution that resulted in the siege of their city. Exploring how artists understood and spoke about their experiences of war, it places a focus on a series of recognizable discourses that have since become synonymous with the memory of the siege of Sarajevo. Hinging its central arguments on a micro-historical reading of a highly particular community that existed simultaneously on the practical periphery of Yugoslav cultural developments and within the center of the state’s fragmentation, this text reassesses the ways ordinary people experienced the onset of war in their community and how they survived the same. Ewa Anna Kumelowski is a historian of 20th Century Yugoslav cultural history, with a focus on expressions of everyday experiences in war, particularly amongst marginalized or otherwise overlooked populations. She holds a joint PhD from the Humboldt University of Berlin and the EHESS in Paris.