Red Dawns and Kulturni center Q – Klub Tiffany present

Photo exhibition opening and presentation

Belma Bećirbašić (BiH):

Koje tijelo govoriš? Politike tijela i opiranje

(Which Body Do You Speak? Body Politics and Resistance to Norms)

In Bosnian. Translation to English available on demand.

Belma Bećirbašić is going to speak about forms of body enslavement and controversies surrounding female corporeality as part of the presentation of her book Body, Femininity and Power – Strategies of Inscribing Patriarchal Discourse (Synopsis, Sarajevo/Zagreb, 2011) and as part of her experimental photographic project in progress Which Body Do You Speak?

Belma’s work explores dominant stereotypes that construct the body image, the aesthetic criteria, societal perceptions, the shame and self-repugnance, but also the sites of resistance to (bodily) norms. Refusing to conform to the essentialist dogma of transculturality, she focuses on the context of particular realities of post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina, affected by complex and unstable processes: the socialist legacy and impact of imported neoliberal practices, the conflict and its memorialisation, and the strengthening of the cleric-ethnonationalist politics, resulting finally in the re-patriarchalization of wider social values.

Accordingly, Bećirbašić portrays several contextual situations and representations of women in Bosnian society, produced within the most vivid discursive strategies of the body: the pop-cultural (body as a place of market production – turbofolk), the bio-political (body as abject and trauma, at the intersection of militaristic discourse of nationalism and victimization – war rapes and the post-war cementing of trauma), and the ethno-religious (body as a paradigm of innocence and resistance simultaneously, in which religious discourse seeks to embody itself through the ambivalent rapport toward the hijab).

In addition, the festival will host an exhibition of Belma’s experimental project in progress Which body do you speak?, the photographic exploration of female corporeality and its multiple and ambiguous meanings: naked, despised, overweight, contested, dubious, wretched, subordinated, traumatic, subversive bodies … By exploring their own corporal relationship, silent subjects in the photos speak (with) their body, perceiving it as their primary identity that constantly lingers on the borders of resistance to norms, whether they aspire to reproduce or reject them. The camera lens becomes a living social map which represses their bodily freedom, but also helps them to re-conquer and re-interpret her. The body thus becomes an experimental area, a tabula rasa in which the portrayed subjects inscribe their own intimate bodily perceptions, challenge ideal and imposed standards, and reshape social meanings. Although they represent entirely distinct bodily identities, each of them raises the issue of the body as an effect of power, of shame and abjectness as an (im)possibility to comply with ideological norms, alongside challenging stereotyped and ‘suitable’ representations of bodies and femininities.

At the event, Belma’s book Body, Femininity and Power (in Bosnian) is going to be available at a discount price.

Belma Bećirbašić is an independent researcher, essayist, journalist, short story novelist and activist from Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. She has lived in Paris and New York City. She holds a B.A. in journalism and M.A. in gender studies and was awarded a Fulbright Visiting Scholarship at Columbia University, NY (2011/12). For the past ten years, she has worked as an investigative journalist while simultaneously engaging in the field of human rights and collaborating with various civil rights organizations. She was one of the first to introduce feminist engaged journalism in postwar Bosnian media. As the editor and journalist of the formerly independent Bosnian magazine Dani, she investigated and raised awareness about a number of gender-based violence issues in the Balkans: trafficking of women, war rapes, sexual violence at universities, discrimination of girls in rural areas and the general discrimination of Roma women and LGBTIQ people.

Belma was awarded several times; in 2003, she received Amnesty International’s award for Global Human Rights Journalism for her article on the fate of babies born to the victims of systematic rape during the war in Bosnia. Her book Body, Femininity and Power – Strategies of Inscribing Patriarchal Discourse was released by Synopsis (Sarajevo/Zagreb, 2011). She published two short stories, The Man Who Hated Trees (2010) and Affricates (2011) in Bosnian language. Her passions are writing, photography and being on the road; her academic interests are memory, trauma, nationalism and biopolitics; her feminism is resistance.

Exhibition opening time on March 7^th and 8^th: from 6 pm to 10 pm.

Co-production: ŠKUC-Kulturni center Q-Klub Tiffany

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