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We're in a Downtown Toronto café. The familiar din of baristas, regulars, grinders, and steam is somewhere behind us. People are sitting around us, with laptops, newspapers, or friends in front of them and drinks at their sides. It's a Tuesday morning, and Novka Ćosović places a bundle of photographs on the table in front of me.
A man is shooting a machine gun out the kitchen window. A school gymnasium is repurposed as a morgue. Children are lying on a linoleum floor; you can't tell the sleeping from the dead. An emaciated prisoner sits on a decorative rug in a bathroom turned cell, surrounded by subway tile. Soldiers stand at the ready in an apartment foyer, the wall decorated with bullet holes and Strawberry Shortcake pin-ups. "That's what I started with," Ćosović tells me, "the backgrounds."
As part of Nuit Blanche 2016, Ćosović's installation—The Museum—explores the strange and painfully uncomfortable interstice of architecture and mass violence. "I grew up in Toronto," Ćosović explains, "but my parents came from former Yugoslavia." Throughout the Balkan Wars of the 90s, that meant "seeing the violence on TV and hearing my mom crying in the basement at 3 AM." It meant reconciling the living room gulf between "CNN broadcasts" and the "panicked, long-distance phone conversations, which seemed to reflect two very different realities."
How do we process trauma from afar? From this part of the world, "live coverage of violence is mediated through television and photographs," Ćosović tells me. A sense of detachment comes with that perspective. We forget that those rooms might be where someone watched TV and played with their kids, or where someone made coffee or took a nap. "But if you look closer, you notice the backgrounds," the artist stresses, and you get a glimpse into the lives behind the footage.
"In 2011, I visited relatives in Republic Srpska [an autonomous region in Bosnia and Hercegovina], and I went swimming in a hotel pool in Pale. A few days later I learned that the pool had been used to store dead bodies during the 90s," says Ćosović. "After the war, it became a pool again." It's this perverted space that serves as a model for Ćosović's Nuit Blanche installation, which brings a recreation of the pool to Shaw Street's Artscape Youngplace.
Visitors sit in the 'normal' space of the curved, tiled pool, and see violent footage projected in front of them. Reconciling the two perspectives—the expereinced and the mediated—divorced through popular representations of war, the installation yokes together the quotidian and the shockingly macabre. Lived experience breaks down the 'mediatisation' of violence and conflict. Impossible as it may seem, acts of horrific bloodshed inhabit the same world we do.
For Ćosović, the project began as a master's thesis in architecture at the University of Toronto. In conceptualizing the installation, Ćosović's academic work represents the morbid realities of war in the detached, sanitized format of graphic standards. Categorizing horrific violence through the clean visuals and affectless language of graphic standards, the art disturbs the fraught borders between normality and chaos.
"Rule of Thumb: 15 sq ft for each dead body. A pool of 20 x 40 ft accommodates 14 live persons at a time. However, during a war, all the dead bodies are in the pool at once, the pool and surroundings are adequate for 370 dead bodies," the text reads (below).
The experiential installation is playfully called 'The Museum,' but that's hardly what it is. Just as media cleaves violence apart from our own lived experience, museums sequester art and artefacts away from the living, breathing world. Ćosović's new paradigm does the opposite. It brings the wars home. Tragically, that's where they've always been.
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More information about The Museum is available via the Nuit Blanche website, linked here. The installation will be shown in Studio 108 of Artscape Youngplace, located at 180 Shaw Street. Nuit Blanche takes place from sunset to sunrise on the night of Saturday, October 1st - check out our associated forum thread here.
