Thinking Between the Images: A Comparative Perspective on the Visual Nature of the Commemorations of the Donbas War in Ukraine and the 1999 NATO Bombing in Serbia
This project comparatively observes two thematically distant but aesthetically very similar exhibitions: one dedicated to the war in Donbas at the ATO Museum in Dnipro and the exhibition “Defense 78” dedicated to the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia in Belgrade. The project aims to understand how museological practice constructs facts about wars. The research departs from the question of why these two different conflicts have such similar aesthetics of memorialization. The project examines the materiality of the exhibitions (their similar use of colors, artifacts, materials, text and photography) and engages also deeper into the understanding of how aesthetics contribute to the creation of history and memory. While both the Yugoslav wars of dissolution and the post-Soviet wars belong to the trajectory of the end of the Cold War, these two regions are seldomly examined from a comparative perspective. This visual analysis provides an easily perceivable example of how these two regions have much more in common than one might think and that a comparative perspective is necessary to understand the trajectories of change and the nature of new wars in the period after the Cold War.