Authors

Zeljana Tunic¹;  ¹ Martin Luther Unversity of Halle-Wittenberg, Germany

Discussion

The paper follows the video artwork Snajperist (The Sniper, 2007) made by Bosnian artist Adela Jušić to dig deep into the intimacy of being exposed to sniper attacks during the siege of Sarajevo (1992-1996) when civilians got routinely shot from the hills around and overlooking Sarajevo. The unpredictable nature of shooting from concealment was a persuasive politics of terror aimed at establishing an inseparable link between bodily appearance and exposure to violence and death. The work of Adela Jušić illuminates this link from a rather unusual perspective, having an autobiographical background, namely that her father, a sniper and a member of the Bosnian Army, was killed by a sniper’s bullet from an enemy army that hit his eye. We get to know a daughter’s voice caught in a net of military logic. While one narrative strand tells the story of a sniper against a sniper, it eschews provoking identification with the warrior and postulating martial masculinity. It is the daughter that we become intimately acquainted with, her voice multiplying and whirling the data, boding the near death. From her perspective, the warrior’s manhood is juxtaposed with the personal sphere of being a father and is imbued with one of the most intimate bonds – the feeling of loss. The piece underlines Jušić’s commitment to the feminist perspective and the inquiry into the everyday reality in war and post-war Bosnia-Hercegovina beyond the nationalistic mainstream categories.