Force of trauma

The recent, failed attempt to bring face-to-face two different but inter-connected ‘traumatised’ contemporary art scenes will be the starting point for this article. The brave and courageous exhibition series, curated by Vida Knežević, Kristian Lukić, Ivana Marjanović and Gordana Nikolić, with the title Odstupanje (Exception) aimed to bring “together with roundtables, presentations and publication in the forthcoming period, analyze certain facts that an average person from Serbia was not allowed or did not want to know [about KosovoKosovo is a region in the Balkans, presently under the ad interim control of the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo and protection of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's Kosovo Force ...].” 1) Organisers of the exhibition wanted to create a platform for people in Serbia to think about KosovoKosovo is a region in the Balkans, presently under the ad interim control of the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo and protection of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's Kosovo Force ... in a different way, rather than as a territory of their spiritualFrom the perspective of anthropologic and psychological phenomena, rituals have certain importance in processes of grief and mourning ... heritage and the roots of their national identity. And to accept and understand that KosovoKosovo is a region in the Balkans, presently under the ad interim control of the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo and protection of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's Kosovo Force ... is populated with Albanians with their own exceptional history of recent parallel institutions, mass deportation and violence conducted by Serbian military and paramilitary forces. They wanted people to think about the traumaPsychological trauma can happen soon after witnessing or being the victim of a traumatic event ... that the Albanian population in KosovoKosovo is a region in the Balkans, presently under the ad interim control of the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo and protection of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's Kosovo Force ... lived through in the nineties.

What happened after the exhibition opening, which took place on January 22 2008 in the Museum of Contemporary Art Vojvodina in Novi Sad, is that members of the ultra-nationalist Radical Party condemned the Odstupanje exhibition as blasphemy. The second part of the project, which had been planned to open in the Kontekst Gallery in Belgrade on February 7 2008 was violently attacked by the organised ultra-nationalist group ‘Obraz’ during the exhibition opening; one work displayed in the exhibition got destroyed.

After the demonstration by this group, the police closed the exhibition to protect the security of organisers and participants. What happened in this exhibition was that the face-to-face encounter of Serbians with the traumaPsychological trauma can happen soon after witnessing or being the victim of a traumatic event ... and experience of Albanians in general was impossible. This impossibility has one main reason, which is the language of pain and traumaPsychological trauma can happen soon after witnessing or being the victim of a traumatic event ... that finds its home in silence. Particularly in this case it means that Serbian people who do not know anything, or are not allowed to know anything about the traumaPsychological trauma can happen soon after witnessing or being the victim of a traumatic event ... of KosovoKosovo is a region in the Balkans, presently under the ad interim control of the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo and protection of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's Kosovo Force ... Albanians (as organisers of the exhibition assume), will never be able to empathise with the situation because of the different language they speak. This different language must not be understood in ethnical philological terms, but rather as a different language, which the oppressor and the oppressed are talking.

The theory of George Bataille, according to which sadismMuch of the behaviour is complementary to that of masochists; the difference is that sadists are the perpetrators rather than the recipients ... is only possible when the torturer doesn’t understand the language of the tortured, can be applied to this situation. For Serbian police it is impossible to imagine how it hurts to be Albanian. The Serbian police (as all the police of the world) is interpellated into an ideology that doesn’t recognise the experience of other as valid, human or even possible. For a Serbian citizen (and not to mention police) to be able to look at a contemporary art work by a Kosovar Albanian, the most necessary fundamental need, or minimum consensus, is to be open to the language of the Albanian experience. 2)

Even if it is not clearly mentioned, the Odstupanje exhibition is about the reconciliation of Serbs and Albanians for a better future in better co-existence; it is an optimistic possibility for “remorse as an ethical act activated in true face-to-face encounter”, as Jill Bennett formulates in her famous book on traumaPsychological trauma can happen soon after witnessing or being the victim of a traumatic event ... and contemporary art. 3) But as Bennett shows in her analysis of Deborah Hoffman and Francis Reid’s 2000 documentary film Long Night’s Journey into Day, where they want to show what happens when a police officer who killed black Africans has a face-to-face encounter with the dead men's mothers; what happens is silence. Silence of the mothers towards the policeman, who was begging for forgivenessThe trait forgiveness is the disposition to forgive interpersonal transgressions over time and across situations ... for the crimes that he had committed years ago. But here forgivenessThe trait forgiveness is the disposition to forgive interpersonal transgressions over time and across situations ... is impossible (as is any kind of empathyAn individual's objective and insightful awareness of the feelings and behaviour of another person ...), not only because of the unbearable pain and griefGrief without complications is a normal response to loss. In the first phase it is usually manifested as a state of shock, with expression of numbness or bewilderment ..., but also because of the different language that the mothers and the police officer are speaking. That is why we cannot talk about reconciliation of those who don’t understand each other.

In order to show the impossibility of this kind of encounter, Bennett quotes Derrida’s note on forgivenessThe trait forgiveness is the disposition to forgive interpersonal transgressions over time and across situations ... where he says: “Even if I say ‘I do not forgive you’ to someone who asks my forgivenessThe trait forgiveness is the disposition to forgive interpersonal transgressions over time and across situations ..., but whom I understand and who understands me, then the process of reconciliation has begun.”4) But in the case of the film of Hoffman and Reid, no reconciliation happened, as is the case with the exhibition of Odstupanje.

In order to start the process of mutual understanding, for mutual co-existence in a safe future, maybe the first step would be for the Serbs to accept the minimum consensus proposed by Branimir Stojanovic; then the experience of traumaPsychological trauma can happen soon after witnessing or being the victim of a traumatic event ... and parallel institutions would be lessons that the Serbs could learn for political emancipation.

Ironically, one of the most problematic artworks exhibited in Odstupanje was an installation titled Face to Face by artist Dren Maliqi. The work, which Maliqi realised in 2003 in completely different circumstances, consists of two photographs in an Andy Warhol style, facing each other with a guns. One of the photographs is of Elvis Presley, taken from a movie. Another one is of Adem Jashari, a member of UÇK (KLA – Kosova Liberation Army), who was killed together with all of his family in 1998 by the Serbian army, and who has become one of the most popular Albanian heroes of its recent past. The artist as he explains it, and the curators as they understood this confrontation between Presley and Jashari in Warholian style is dealing with consumer society, which is investing all the heroes of the modern world with the same rules of economy-politics, representation system, and rules of society of spectacle. Apart from this general interpretation, we can also read this work as an attempt to look at UCK’s Marxist past, which is in direct opposition to the American Elvis-styled capitalism. In general what I want to show here is that the work of Maliqi and of other contemporary artists from KosovoKosovo is a region in the Balkans, presently under the ad interim control of the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo and protection of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's Kosovo Force ... have a complex relation with their ideological, economical, and global formulations in relation to their recent traumaPsychological trauma can happen soon after witnessing or being the victim of a traumatic event .... As in the previous section, I tried to show how difficult it is for Serbs, because of language problems, to engage with Albanian traumatic experiences. Now in the following two sections, I will try to show two different approaches to traumatic experience by KosovoKosovo is a region in the Balkans, presently under the ad interim control of the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo and protection of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's Kosovo Force ... artists themselves. That would mean in practice that Face to Face is more than a simple provocation of face-to-face encounter of Serbs and Albanians. In her book Jill Bennett wants to show that the fundamental error in many contemporary art works dealing with traumaPsychological trauma can happen soon after witnessing or being the victim of a traumatic event ... is “lying in the aesthetic reduction of traumaPsychological trauma can happen soon after witnessing or being the victim of a traumatic event ... to the shock-inducing signifier” 5), which is to de-politicise and a-historicise traumaPsychological trauma can happen soon after witnessing or being the victim of a traumatic event ... with some psychological terms by reducing art’s function to catharsis or to sublimation effect. This is largely consumed, for example, by the type of ‘traumatic art’ and rapid reconciliation programmes of the humanitarian organisations 6). Bennett is interested in works of contemporary art that are trying to deal with traumaPsychological trauma can happen soon after witnessing or being the victim of a traumatic event ... beyond the principle affect of original experience. Instead of categorising traumaPsychological trauma can happen soon after witnessing or being the victim of a traumatic event ... to first-hand and second-hand experiences, he is more interested in how to talk about traumaPsychological trauma can happen soon after witnessing or being the victim of a traumatic event ... so that it is not just understandable to those who had the misfortune to experience it. But at the same time he is aware that we cannot talk about traumaPsychological trauma can happen soon after witnessing or being the victim of a traumatic event ... with only theoretical discourse rationalising it (and indeed reducing it) to the extent of pure historical and mnemonic phenomenon. This is the reason why Bennett says that “there is something innately uncontainable about the phenomenon of pain [and traumaPsychological trauma can happen soon after witnessing or being the victim of a traumatic event ...] within the representation” (p. 50), which means that with our everyday language and representational semantics we cannot understand the real effect of traumaPsychological trauma can happen soon after witnessing or being the victim of a traumatic event .... Here Bennett, in order to understand traumaPsychological trauma can happen soon after witnessing or being the victim of a traumatic event ..., uses the term that Deleuze coins as encountered sign, to describe the sign that is felt, rather than recognised or perceived through cognition. This sensuality of theory then would enable theoreticians to discuss traumaPsychological trauma can happen soon after witnessing or being the victim of a traumatic event ... and allow artists to work with it in a more critical way. In the end he hopes this is the tool that would give élan to theory, which is lacking affectivity, and to visual art, which serves this theory.

Sokol Beqiri is one of the rare artists in KosovoKosovo is a region in the Balkans, presently under the ad interim control of the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo and protection of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's Kosovo Force ... who deals with the experience of traumaPsychological trauma can happen soon after witnessing or being the victim of a traumatic event ... in his entire opus. In his works he deals with traumaPsychological trauma can happen soon after witnessing or being the victim of a traumatic event ... as confession (Supermen), as metaphor to art history (End of expressionism..?), as banality of evil (Milka), and as impossibility to produce new art work (Everything you wanted …). But in each one of his works, traumaPsychological trauma can happen soon after witnessing or being the victim of a traumatic event ... is something transcending the personal experience of evil, banality or pain and conceptualised with more global and political terms. His work When Angels are too late (2001) is perfect for showing this global interconnection of tropes in traumatic experience. The work is a large reproduction of the painting by Caravaggio, with the religious theme of Abraham’s sacrificeSacrifice is commonly known as the practice of offering food or the lives of animals or people to the gods as an act of propitiation or worship ... of his son Isaac being interrupted by an angel descending from heaven as saviour who is replacing the son with a sheep to be sacrificeSacrifice is commonly known as the practice of offering food or the lives of animals or people to the gods as an act of propitiation or worship ...d. Approaching the panel we discover a peephole in the middle of the painting through which we see a very short, grainy and looped video of an unbearably shocking scene: a man lying on the ground, his head is pressed down with a military boot and his throat is being slit with a sword. This is a gorey video, which shows violence to Chechnyan fighters taken from Internet. In this work we can obviously see the association with NATO intervention, which was experienced in KosovoKosovo is a region in the Balkans, presently under the ad interim control of the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo and protection of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's Kosovo Force ... almost as a messianic salvation. Western intervention, which brings freedom and saves Kosovars from traumaPsychological trauma can happen soon after witnessing or being the victim of a traumatic event ..., is represented in the work of Beqiri as angels, which is actually an ironic nod to the NATO intervention, always represented within the religious discourse of war between the ultimate evil and good. This religious fight became even more obvious in the intervention in Iraq. Representation of the traumatic experience of Kosovars with the Biblical motifs is a way of showing that what happens in KosovoKosovo is a region in the Balkans, presently under the ad interim control of the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo and protection of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's Kosovo Force ... has global interconnections, and it is not just about the illogical evil of what unfortunate Albanians have been through. Just the fact that the peephole video is from Chechnya is proof that traumaPsychological trauma can happen soon after witnessing or being the victim of a traumatic event ... is a more global phenomenon than it is normally understood. But for some people, as for the Chechnyans, the angels are late in coming.

Sokol Bequiri, When Angels are Too late, 2002.

Bennett, in order to discuss the problem of global interconnections of traumaPsychological trauma can happen soon after witnessing or being the victim of a traumatic event ..., analyses works of the Australian artist Gordon Bennett, who has a series of paintings in the style of Jean Michel Basquiat titled 911, related to the 11 SeptemberThe September 11, 2001 attacks (often referred to as 9/11) were a series of coordinated suicide attacks by al-Qaeda upon the United States ... 2001 attacks on New York City. According to Jill Bennett, Gordon Bennett is someone who deals with his Australian aboriginal origins by performing as ‘the other’ in the official national visual representation. In his work 911 he chooses to perform within the frame of Basquiat’s aesthetics in thinking about the traumaPsychological trauma can happen soon after witnessing or being the victim of a traumatic event ... that happened to New Yorkers. Australians with aboriginal origins paint the 911 traumaPsychological trauma can happen soon after witnessing or being the victim of a traumatic event ... in the style of artists with African origins. This is, according to Jill Bennett, an artistic strategy to make the general audience realise the global interconnection of the traumaPsychological trauma can happen soon after witnessing or being the victim of a traumatic event ..., which happened for example in New York. This means that the 911 attacks have a connection with the American policy in the Middle East, traumatised asylum seekers in the West, military inequality, oil etc.7) These interconnections of the experience of traumaPsychological trauma can happen soon after witnessing or being the victim of a traumatic event ... are something that Bennett repeats again and again in her book; she is interested in an artwork of traumaPsychological trauma can happen soon after witnessing or being the victim of a traumatic event ... that “finds its way to activate and realise connections. The question to ask of the artwork is thus, not “What does it mean?” or “What traumaPsychological trauma can happen soon after witnessing or being the victim of a traumatic event ... is depicted?” but “How does it work?” – how does it put insides and outsides into contact in order to establish a basis for empathyAn individual's objective and insightful awareness of the feelings and behaviour of another person ...?” 8) Even if Sokol Beqiri does not go so far as, for example, Gordon Bennett, he is also very much interested in finding the ways in which traumaPsychological trauma can happen soon after witnessing or being the victim of a traumatic event ... works in an artwork.

All the artists participating in the Odstupanje exhibition, with the exception of Driton Hajredini, were born after 1980, after the period when KosovoKosovo is a region in the Balkans, presently under the ad interim control of the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo and protection of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's Kosovo Force ... started its inevitable process of continuous de-Yugoslavisation in a sense of de-modernisation and vanishing from the political public space. Apart from the works of Lulezim Zeqiri and Flaka Haliti, none of the works exhibited in the Odstupanje exhibition are related to traumatic experience. This is something that is very much common in the contemporary art production in KosovoKosovo is a region in the Balkans, presently under the ad interim control of the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo and protection of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's Kosovo Force .... The best example of this is artist Jakup Ferri, which I will focus on in this section. Ferri’s work doesn’t manifest any traumatic experience. It is more about the history of contemporary art, which he is not part of, about rock’n’roll heroes, his childhood memories of life in a ‘normal’ world (clocks, father’s shoes, father’s art monographies), the lethargy and boredom of urban life, etc. In Ferri’s silence on the issue of traumaPsychological trauma can happen soon after witnessing or being the victim of a traumatic event ... we can in a way see that the new generation of contemporary artists in KosovoKosovo is a region in the Balkans, presently under the ad interim control of the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo and protection of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's Kosovo Force ... are not interested in the works of their ‘aesthetic’ fathers 9). No work of young KosovoKosovo is a region in the Balkans, presently under the ad interim control of the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo and protection of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's Kosovo Force ... artists bears witnessA witness is someone who has firsthand knowledge about a crime or dramatic event through their senses (e.g. seeing, hearing, smelling, touching) and can help certify important considerations to the crime or event ... to any conflict, irony, parody, or critique to the old generation of contemporary abstract painting of KosovoKosovo is a region in the Balkans, presently under the ad interim control of the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo and protection of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's Kosovo Force ... modernism from the late 1960s to the late 1980s. All those are passé, fossils and dinosaurs from art academy curricula, representing the heavy national burden of ethnological and historical consciousness of being proud of being Albanian. These modernist painters, among the most prolific ones are Muslim Muliqi, Rexhep Ferri and Xhevdet Xhafa, were the ones who dealt with national representation as aesthetical mediators, ones who were canonising the political traumatised situation of KosovoKosovo is a region in the Balkans, presently under the ad interim control of the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo and protection of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's Kosovo Force ... with artistic values.

Jakup Ferri and his generation of artists now, in order to find some new way of expressing their everyday life politics, have totally rejected the aesthetic formulations of the old generation; first they changed their medium from painting to not-yet-discovered medium of video art, and then instead of questioning the local and recent actual political history, they contextualised their artworks in the frame of international art history, referring to artists such as Damien Hirst, Yoko Ono, Bill Viola, Marina Abramovic, Christo, Baldessari etc. These non site-specific artworks, which had the function of normalising the post Rambouillet situation in KosovoKosovo is a region in the Balkans, presently under the ad interim control of the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo and protection of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's Kosovo Force ..., created also a lot of collateral damageCollateral damage is a term used by the U.S. military for unintended or incidental damage caused during a military operation .... Damage such as silencing the collective traumaCollective trauma is a traumatic experience shared by a group of people or even an entire society ... for the sake of normalisation, or de-politicising contemporary art for the sake of non site-specific formulations.

Jakup Ferri, untitled, drawing series, 2005-2006.

But is there a critical possibility in the silence of the traumaPsychological trauma can happen soon after witnessing or being the victim of a traumatic event ..., as Shoshana Felman has discussed especially in her text on Walter Benjamin. Here in the beginning one has to be aware of the silence of traumaPsychological trauma can happen soon after witnessing or being the victim of a traumatic event ... and of silencing the traumaPsychological trauma can happen soon after witnessing or being the victim of a traumatic event ..., even if they can overlap each other in many cases, even in very problematic way.

Felman’s interpretation of Benjamin’s silence is based on his two texts, Storyteller and Theses on History, but the real silence behind Benjamin lies in Port Beau, on the border between France and Spain where he died. Another death, which is supporting silence in Benjamin, is the death of his two best friends just in the beginning of the First World War, when they sent a letter to Benjamin prior to their suicideAccording to epidemiological investigations between 1.1% and 4.6% of the population have a suicidal attempt at some point during their life ... informing him where he could find their dead bodies. Felman argues that “their traumaPsychological trauma can happen soon after witnessing or being the victim of a traumatic event ... must remain a private matter that cannot be symbolised collectively. It cannot be exchanged, it must fall silent.”10) This non-exchangeability of experience of traumaPsychological trauma can happen soon after witnessing or being the victim of a traumatic event ... is maybe the key in understanding the silence in Ferri’s and many other artists’ work. These kind of works could also be described as an attitude against sociological quick interpretations, which want to hold critical distance toward the collectivisation of uneasy experience. Looking at Ferri’s drawings, where he is using bullets and guns in the most productive, and in the most abstract, everyday life practices, like climbing the stairs, in Sisyphus-like games, we feel that anyway traumaPsychological trauma can happen soon after witnessing or being the victim of a traumatic event ... is always there, but now silenced and closed from the banal interpretations.