engleski

Abandoning Ideology of Monumental Exhibition Layout: Jasenovac As Doubly Mediated Trauma

Watching the old exhibition layout of memorial museum Jasenovac (Croatia), which dates from period of Yugoslavia, getting replaced with a new one, one gains a clear insight into the change from communist to post-communist exhibition practices that deal with representation of trauma. The old layout of the exhibition was raising tragedy on the universal level by treating victims of the concentration camp as nameless masses, and it was expected from all of the visitors, which were also treated as a mass, to identify with represented trauma participating in such a manner in formation of universal collective identity. The new layout, on the contrary, introduces victims as individuals with names (and by doing that it relates to the contemporary trend in recent European museum practices), but also as the members of certain groups, which makes visible the situation in contemporary post-communist societies where trauma of concentration camp becomes the trauma with which only those groups whose members were victims identify, i.e. becomes the trauma of the Other. Although the war of the `90s is not directly thematised in the new exhibition layout nor in the polemics on the layout, the trauma of the recent war is implicitly inherent in this change of modes of representations, and it mediates the trauma of Jasenovac, as well as it, though not explicitly articulated, underlays contemporary art historians`, historians` and curators` discourse on Jasenovac. Thus the aim of this paper is to examine, in the given context, mechanisms by which one trauma is incorporated into the symbolical process of the reconstruction of another trauma.

Trauma; postmodernist museum; history writing

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