The Forensics of Memorialization:
​Visual Culture and Memory Politics in Former Yugoslavia (working title)

​My book project is a provocative look at how contemporary artists in ex-Yugoslavia are increasingly using forensic findings from mass graves (the remains of the dead and the objects found with them) as a means of creating narratives of memorialization in the wake of political, social, and/or cultural conflict. I refer to these narratives, comprised of photography, installation, drawing and other visual forms, as those of the "forensic imagination." With this in mind, I examine memory politics through cultural productions emerging out of regions and communities that have suffered political atrocities, with a primary focus on the contemporary past in former Yugoslavia.

Examining how the forensic imagination calls attention to and often contests or elides “official” government and international versions of history, I assert that these experimental works offer an alternative strategy for conceptualizing difficult pasts and in so doing assist the local and transnational communities in the difficult work of interrogating and establishing post-conflict commemorative practices. Further, the close and careful elucidation of such practices draws attention to and often engenders important and innovative new avenues for truth-telling.

This study also calls into question the ethics of using forensic material as part of an artistic or aesthetic process. In an age of pervasive commodification and desensitization about death—particularly mass death—the role of forensic material becomes even more problematic and crucial. Although traditionally viewed solely as scientific and legal evidence, examination of the movement of such evidence from the pragmatic to the imaginative realm opens into a significant new discourse of the relationship between atrocity and aesthetics.