Amid violent siege warfare, citizens of Sarajevo risked their lives to see a candlelit pro- duction of Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot in 1993, while bullets and grenades rained down on the streets outside.
The play, directed by the late American writer and filmmaker Susan Sontag, was staged at a youth theatre in Sarajevo at the height of the siege, which took hold of the city in the early 1990s during the break-up of Yugoslavia.
The conflict lasted almost four years, claimed thousands of lives and reduced the economy to tatters, resulting in a deeply divided society – it is one of many stories told by the Historical Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
First opened in 2003, the museum’s permanent exhibition, Besieged Sarajevo, explores the destruction of the city and its culture by highlighting specific instances, such as the fire at the central library, that resulted in the loss of millions of books and manuscripts. But embedded in the display is a focus on the resilience and spirit of the country’s people.
The museum’s director, Elma Hasimbegovic, says she was mindful not to polarise the conflict by taking an “us versus them” stance against the Serbs, and by highlighting aspects such as the persistent attendance of Waiting for Godot, she feels she has achieved her aims.
To focus on the inventive ways people found to survive the conflict, the museum encouraged members of the public to bring in everyday objects that helped them deal with the huge food and power shortages the siege brought.
Items on display include stoves made from tin cans, cigarettes packed in chocolate wrappers and handmade weapons. Two that really stand out are a light made from hospi- tal infusion tubes and an electrical generator made from a car engine.
“The objects demonstrate the creativity and ingenuity that people had to find to survive the three-year siege,” says Hasimbegovic. “They would not have believed these objects would become history.”
Established in 1945 as the Museum of National Liberation, the building itself also stands as a testament to the violence: visitors can see holes on the exterior left by gunfire and grenades, and bullets still lie buried in the stained glass window in the entrance hall.
However, unlike the city’s National Museum, which closed in 2012, the Historical Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina has not fallen victim to the grave challenges facing the city’s cultural sector, which has been largely starved of funding.
The peace agreement that brought the war to an end created divisions along ethnic lines, and ushered in a complex system of governance with none of the authorities directly accountable for the country’s heritage and cultural sector.
It was the resilient spirit of the staff, many of whom are volunteers, Hasimbegovic says, that helped the museum survive, because of their ability to look for new ways to generate income and attract support. Forging international links with other museums has been key to the ongoing success of the institution.
The First World War Centenary Partnership, led by Britain’s Imperial War Museums, with support from the British Council and EU funding, led to the Bosnia-Herzegovinian museum developing the exhibition, And Then, in Sarajevo the Shot Was Fired: the First World War and Bosnia-Herzegovina, which explores the history of the country and its people during the period.
The show details the annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina by the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1908, which inflamed tensions with Serbia and eventually led to the assas- sination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo – the gunshot that changed the world.
Bringing war stories to life
Interpreting the events of the first world war for a society that has no collective memory of it has its challenges.
At London’s Imperial War Museum (IWM) in the 1920s, exhibitions of the same topic had a clear target audience: war veterans who had fought, and soldiers and civilians who had experienced the war effort on the home front. “The veterans came to see their own experiences evoked,” says James Taylor, the head of first world war gallery content at IWM.
A hundred years on, it has been necessary for the museum to reinterpret the war for an audience that has access to limitless material on the conflict, but no experience of it. IWM addressed this challenge by taking a contemporaneous approach, looking at how the conflict was experienced first hand, before perceptions were coloured by the resulting flourish of poetry, art, film and literature.
This allows for a more nuanced understanding and provides an opportunity to challenge common attitudes towards a war that nobody wanted to fight and claimed the lives of 888,246 British soldiers, says Taylor.
“The IWM’s new first world war galleries demonstrate that people didn’t see it as a senseless war,” he says. “They were fighting an enemy that would prove as brutal in Britain as it had in occupied Belgium.”
The first world war galleries at the IWM are fitted with all the modern trappings that 21st-century visitors expect, and are noteworthy for their use of sound, animation, video, and the lack of a traditional showcase and text approach.
The emphasis remains on objects, many of which were chosen for the fact that they shed new light on the conflict. For instance, Fuse 106 – a clever device created in collaboration with jewellers –meant that artillery shells exploded horizontally, proving effective at cutting barbed wire on the western front battlefields.
One of the most unusual items on display is a hollow, metal camouflaged tree, a replica of the original that stood in no man’s land and allowed British soldiers to crawl inside it and observe the enemy undetected. Acquired by the museum in 1918, the replica tree was designed using sketches by artists serving as soldiers, who had made the original tree too.
“We wanted to make sure that the objects weren’t just shown as relics, but to bring them to life with stories about the individuals who made them, used them or were on the receiving end of them,” says Taylor.
National Museums Liverpool takes a different route to explore historical and modern wars – through the women they affected. Poppies: Women and War (until 5 June 2016) shows portraits of women, who have suffered as a result of conflict, alongside images of poppies – a poignant reminder of new life springing from death and destruction.
Meanwhile, Ulster Museum in Northern Ireland explores the Troubles – a 30-year political conflict that brought violence to the region and was finally ended by the Good Friday agreement in 1998 – and the loss and grief they brought.
The museum, run by National Museums Northern Ireland (NMNI), has mounted a display entitled Silent Testimony, on until 17 January 2016, which comprises portraits by Belfast painter Colin Davidson of 18 people connected by their experiences of loss. The conflict claimed more than 3,600 lives.
Davidson’s large-scale artworks are built on the foundation of a common humanity. “I have looked at each person as a fellow human being – labels or identity weren’t of primary importance to me,” he says.
“While each portrait is personal, Silent Testimony demonstrates the resonance each one has with thousands of individuals – the injured, their families, the families of those who died and the wider community.”
Kim Mawhinney, the head of art at NMNI, hopes the exhibition, “will play a small part in contributing to a better future for communities in Northern Ireland”.
NMNI is also changing its permanent Troubles exhibition at Ulster Museum, created as part of a £17.5m refurbishment of the modern history galleries in 2009. The exhi- bition aims to present an unbiased, accurate account of the conflict.
It has, however, been criticised, says William Blair, the head of human history at NMNI, “because of its lim- ited nature. But it hasn’t been in relation to bias, which is a big achievement.”
He believes Ulster Museum’s collection would not be diverse enough to build a comprehensive narrative based just on objects.
But NMNI has secured funding of £370,000 from the Heritage Lottery Fund for its Collecting the Troubles and Beyond project, with the aim of expanding its collections. The money, which will be spent over a five-year period, allows the museum to acquire items from auctions and websites, and negotiate individual purchases by forging links with specialists in the conflict.
The funding will also go towards hiring a three-year project curator, who will help engage the public with themes of conflict, history, social change and community memory using workshops, seminars and events.
While these sensitive interpretations of conflicts will never heal the wounds of those affected, they can play an important role in helping communities reflect on the past in the spirit of peace, mutual respect and understanding.
A session at the Museums Association Annual Conference (5-6 November, Birmingham), will look at how museums tackle issues of conflict.
Kurt Vonnegut’s 1969 novel, Slaughterhouse- Five, or The Children’s Crusade: a Duty-Dance with Death, based on his experience during the British attack on Dresden in Germany during the second world war, inspired an exhibition of photographs at Tate Modern earlier this year.
Significantly for Simon Baker, the curator of the Tate exhibition, Conflict, Time, Photography, Vonnegut wrote his book almost 25 years after the 1945 bombing raid occurred.
“It was something that Vonnegut had lived through but it took him all that time to work out what he wanted to say and how he wanted to say it,” Baker says.
The exhibition arranged photographs chronologically according to how long after an event they were taken.
For example, photographs taken seven months after the fire bombing of Dresden were shown alongside those taken seven months after the end of the first Gulf war.
“We thought it would be interesting to shift the relationship of photography and war from photojournalism and reportage to something far more reflective than [a photographer] taking a photo in the middle of the action,” Baker says.
This new approach allowed a more thorough exploration of what happened
to the survivors of conflicts, notably in the case of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which posed health implications up to 30 years later.
“We usually think of the aftermath being immediately after an event, but it actually travels great spans of time, affecting people’s lives for generations after,” Baker says.
The centenary of the first world war has resulted in lots of funding for small cultural institutions across the UK.
Last July, John Whittingdale, the secretary of state for culture, media and sport, announced that the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) will make an additional £4m available in 2015 and 2016 for projects and activities exploring, conserving and sharing the local heritage of the 1914-18 conflict.
At the time of the announcement, the HLF’s First World War: Then and Now programme, launched in 2013, had awarded 900 grants totalling more than £7m.
The Keep Military Museum in Dorset was awarded £55,000 over four years, and it has used the money to recreate fighting and communication trenches and military HQ dugouts, make a new first world war display area, as well as revamp two displays on the Gallipoli campaign.
The museum has also set up an education centre where objects from the collection can be handled. The displays focus on the involvement of the Devonshire and Dorset regiments, and the Dorset yeomanry during the first world war, covering topics such as technology and warfare, and war literature.
“We have to represent three regiments and some significant events – the Devons and the Dorsets were on the Somme,” says Chris Copson, the curator at the Keep Military Museum in Dorset. “Their colossal achievements amounted to four Victoria crosses, which resonates with the public and the military groups that visit.”
The HLF has granted funding to a wide range of first world war projects. These include Empire Needs Men, an exhibition developed by Narrative Eye, which worked with London’s black and minority ethnic communities in Tottenham and Walthamstow in 2014 to create an interactive world map showing the diversity of the people who fought in the war.
And the project Yours Sincerely, put together by North Tyneside Voluntary Organisations Development Agency, explored the lasting impact of the conflict with 20 young people, who composed replies to letters sent by soldiers on the frontline.
Meanwhile, a project by the Garw Valley Heritage Association explored how the war impacted the mining community of the Garw Valley in Wales.
The play, directed by the late American writer and filmmaker Susan Sontag, was staged at a youth theatre in Sarajevo at the height of the siege, which took hold of the city in the early 1990s during the break-up of Yugoslavia.
The conflict lasted almost four years, claimed thousands of lives and reduced the economy to tatters, resulting in a deeply divided society – it is one of many stories told by the Historical Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
First opened in 2003, the museum’s permanent exhibition, Besieged Sarajevo, explores the destruction of the city and its culture by highlighting specific instances, such as the fire at the central library, that resulted in the loss of millions of books and manuscripts. But embedded in the display is a focus on the resilience and spirit of the country’s people.
The museum’s director, Elma Hasimbegovic, says she was mindful not to polarise the conflict by taking an “us versus them” stance against the Serbs, and by highlighting aspects such as the persistent attendance of Waiting for Godot, she feels she has achieved her aims.
To focus on the inventive ways people found to survive the conflict, the museum encouraged members of the public to bring in everyday objects that helped them deal with the huge food and power shortages the siege brought.
Items on display include stoves made from tin cans, cigarettes packed in chocolate wrappers and handmade weapons. Two that really stand out are a light made from hospi- tal infusion tubes and an electrical generator made from a car engine.
“The objects demonstrate the creativity and ingenuity that people had to find to survive the three-year siege,” says Hasimbegovic. “They would not have believed these objects would become history.”
Established in 1945 as the Museum of National Liberation, the building itself also stands as a testament to the violence: visitors can see holes on the exterior left by gunfire and grenades, and bullets still lie buried in the stained glass window in the entrance hall.
However, unlike the city’s National Museum, which closed in 2012, the Historical Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina has not fallen victim to the grave challenges facing the city’s cultural sector, which has been largely starved of funding.
The peace agreement that brought the war to an end created divisions along ethnic lines, and ushered in a complex system of governance with none of the authorities directly accountable for the country’s heritage and cultural sector.
It was the resilient spirit of the staff, many of whom are volunteers, Hasimbegovic says, that helped the museum survive, because of their ability to look for new ways to generate income and attract support. Forging international links with other museums has been key to the ongoing success of the institution.
The First World War Centenary Partnership, led by Britain’s Imperial War Museums, with support from the British Council and EU funding, led to the Bosnia-Herzegovinian museum developing the exhibition, And Then, in Sarajevo the Shot Was Fired: the First World War and Bosnia-Herzegovina, which explores the history of the country and its people during the period.
The show details the annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina by the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1908, which inflamed tensions with Serbia and eventually led to the assas- sination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo – the gunshot that changed the world.
Bringing war stories to life
Interpreting the events of the first world war for a society that has no collective memory of it has its challenges.
At London’s Imperial War Museum (IWM) in the 1920s, exhibitions of the same topic had a clear target audience: war veterans who had fought, and soldiers and civilians who had experienced the war effort on the home front. “The veterans came to see their own experiences evoked,” says James Taylor, the head of first world war gallery content at IWM.
A hundred years on, it has been necessary for the museum to reinterpret the war for an audience that has access to limitless material on the conflict, but no experience of it. IWM addressed this challenge by taking a contemporaneous approach, looking at how the conflict was experienced first hand, before perceptions were coloured by the resulting flourish of poetry, art, film and literature.
This allows for a more nuanced understanding and provides an opportunity to challenge common attitudes towards a war that nobody wanted to fight and claimed the lives of 888,246 British soldiers, says Taylor.
“The IWM’s new first world war galleries demonstrate that people didn’t see it as a senseless war,” he says. “They were fighting an enemy that would prove as brutal in Britain as it had in occupied Belgium.”
The first world war galleries at the IWM are fitted with all the modern trappings that 21st-century visitors expect, and are noteworthy for their use of sound, animation, video, and the lack of a traditional showcase and text approach.
The emphasis remains on objects, many of which were chosen for the fact that they shed new light on the conflict. For instance, Fuse 106 – a clever device created in collaboration with jewellers –meant that artillery shells exploded horizontally, proving effective at cutting barbed wire on the western front battlefields.
One of the most unusual items on display is a hollow, metal camouflaged tree, a replica of the original that stood in no man’s land and allowed British soldiers to crawl inside it and observe the enemy undetected. Acquired by the museum in 1918, the replica tree was designed using sketches by artists serving as soldiers, who had made the original tree too.
“We wanted to make sure that the objects weren’t just shown as relics, but to bring them to life with stories about the individuals who made them, used them or were on the receiving end of them,” says Taylor.
National Museums Liverpool takes a different route to explore historical and modern wars – through the women they affected. Poppies: Women and War (until 5 June 2016) shows portraits of women, who have suffered as a result of conflict, alongside images of poppies – a poignant reminder of new life springing from death and destruction.
Meanwhile, Ulster Museum in Northern Ireland explores the Troubles – a 30-year political conflict that brought violence to the region and was finally ended by the Good Friday agreement in 1998 – and the loss and grief they brought.
The museum, run by National Museums Northern Ireland (NMNI), has mounted a display entitled Silent Testimony, on until 17 January 2016, which comprises portraits by Belfast painter Colin Davidson of 18 people connected by their experiences of loss. The conflict claimed more than 3,600 lives.
Davidson’s large-scale artworks are built on the foundation of a common humanity. “I have looked at each person as a fellow human being – labels or identity weren’t of primary importance to me,” he says.
“While each portrait is personal, Silent Testimony demonstrates the resonance each one has with thousands of individuals – the injured, their families, the families of those who died and the wider community.”
Kim Mawhinney, the head of art at NMNI, hopes the exhibition, “will play a small part in contributing to a better future for communities in Northern Ireland”.
NMNI is also changing its permanent Troubles exhibition at Ulster Museum, created as part of a £17.5m refurbishment of the modern history galleries in 2009. The exhi- bition aims to present an unbiased, accurate account of the conflict.
It has, however, been criticised, says William Blair, the head of human history at NMNI, “because of its lim- ited nature. But it hasn’t been in relation to bias, which is a big achievement.”
He believes Ulster Museum’s collection would not be diverse enough to build a comprehensive narrative based just on objects.
But NMNI has secured funding of £370,000 from the Heritage Lottery Fund for its Collecting the Troubles and Beyond project, with the aim of expanding its collections. The money, which will be spent over a five-year period, allows the museum to acquire items from auctions and websites, and negotiate individual purchases by forging links with specialists in the conflict.
The funding will also go towards hiring a three-year project curator, who will help engage the public with themes of conflict, history, social change and community memory using workshops, seminars and events.
While these sensitive interpretations of conflicts will never heal the wounds of those affected, they can play an important role in helping communities reflect on the past in the spirit of peace, mutual respect and understanding.
A session at the Museums Association Annual Conference (5-6 November, Birmingham), will look at how museums tackle issues of conflict.
The benefit of hindsight
Kurt Vonnegut’s 1969 novel, Slaughterhouse- Five, or The Children’s Crusade: a Duty-Dance with Death, based on his experience during the British attack on Dresden in Germany during the second world war, inspired an exhibition of photographs at Tate Modern earlier this year.
Significantly for Simon Baker, the curator of the Tate exhibition, Conflict, Time, Photography, Vonnegut wrote his book almost 25 years after the 1945 bombing raid occurred.
“It was something that Vonnegut had lived through but it took him all that time to work out what he wanted to say and how he wanted to say it,” Baker says.
The exhibition arranged photographs chronologically according to how long after an event they were taken.
For example, photographs taken seven months after the fire bombing of Dresden were shown alongside those taken seven months after the end of the first Gulf war.
“We thought it would be interesting to shift the relationship of photography and war from photojournalism and reportage to something far more reflective than [a photographer] taking a photo in the middle of the action,” Baker says.
This new approach allowed a more thorough exploration of what happened
to the survivors of conflicts, notably in the case of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which posed health implications up to 30 years later.
“We usually think of the aftermath being immediately after an event, but it actually travels great spans of time, affecting people’s lives for generations after,” Baker says.
War centenary boosts funding
The centenary of the first world war has resulted in lots of funding for small cultural institutions across the UK.
Last July, John Whittingdale, the secretary of state for culture, media and sport, announced that the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) will make an additional £4m available in 2015 and 2016 for projects and activities exploring, conserving and sharing the local heritage of the 1914-18 conflict.
At the time of the announcement, the HLF’s First World War: Then and Now programme, launched in 2013, had awarded 900 grants totalling more than £7m.
The Keep Military Museum in Dorset was awarded £55,000 over four years, and it has used the money to recreate fighting and communication trenches and military HQ dugouts, make a new first world war display area, as well as revamp two displays on the Gallipoli campaign.
The museum has also set up an education centre where objects from the collection can be handled. The displays focus on the involvement of the Devonshire and Dorset regiments, and the Dorset yeomanry during the first world war, covering topics such as technology and warfare, and war literature.
“We have to represent three regiments and some significant events – the Devons and the Dorsets were on the Somme,” says Chris Copson, the curator at the Keep Military Museum in Dorset. “Their colossal achievements amounted to four Victoria crosses, which resonates with the public and the military groups that visit.”
The HLF has granted funding to a wide range of first world war projects. These include Empire Needs Men, an exhibition developed by Narrative Eye, which worked with London’s black and minority ethnic communities in Tottenham and Walthamstow in 2014 to create an interactive world map showing the diversity of the people who fought in the war.
And the project Yours Sincerely, put together by North Tyneside Voluntary Organisations Development Agency, explored the lasting impact of the conflict with 20 young people, who composed replies to letters sent by soldiers on the frontline.
Meanwhile, a project by the Garw Valley Heritage Association explored how the war impacted the mining community of the Garw Valley in Wales.
