Artists at War

In Artists at War Ewa Kumelowski gives us a thorough and well-grounded insight into the specificities of artistic life in Sarajevo before and during the 1992 - 1996 siege. The book is a fascinating and thoughtful exploration of the nexus of art, resistance and place. It offers a unique look at how artists shaped and reshaped mechanisms of survival against mechanisms of destruction, highly recommended

--Sabina Tanovic, Delft University of Technology, Netherlands


This book follows the lives of Sarajevan visual artists as they responded to the rising instability and political fragmentation that defined the last days of Yugoslavia’s existence. Exploring how these artists understood and spoke about the onset of war, it places a focus on a series of recognizable discourses, touching upon notions of Yugoslav common culture, civilization and cultural resistance, which have since become synonymous with the memory of the siege of Sarajevo. This book hinges its central arguments on a microhistorical reading of this unique cultural community that existed simultaneously on the practical periphery of Yugoslav cultural developments and within the center of the state’s fragmentation. In doing so, it offers a novel approach towards understanding the experiences of everyday life in besieged Sarajevo

Ewa Anna Kumelowski is a historian of 20th Century Yugoslav cultural history, with a focus on expressions of everyday experiences in war, particularly amongst marginalized or otherwise overlooked populations. She holds a joint PhD from the Humboldt University of Berlin and the EHESS in Paris.