LIAS Panel Discussion “War Memory and Infrastructure: Where is Art”

Date: Wednesday, 3 June 2026, 6–8 p.m.
Place: Campus | Central Building C40.501

Wars create memories – personal and collective, both in the forms of lived-in experiences and inherited narratives. Then the memories, through passage of time, are annotated and circulated through complex and sometimes contesting infrastructures - preserved monuments, negotiated museums, published documents, validated testimonies; as well as forbidden tales, obscured signifiers buried in landscapes, semi-legible soundscapes, broken objects and so on. It can be broadly categorised as the former is a declared action committed to reminding and the latter as some kind of localised instinct for remembering. The tangible characteristics of action account and the watery nature of instinct may or may not correspond with each other.

Moreover, the scale of an event / experience alters depending on whether it is perceived from the local context or on a global stage - making the spatial distance do the alteration. Yet, certain assertive actions / principles of a colonized people to challenge the hegemonic / colonial power, over the passage of time, may turn into a weapon for post-colonial toxic nationalism. In both scenarios memory remains the most vulnerable to the change of seasons.

What role can artistic endeavours and people’s archives play in these conflicts between different registers of memories? Can art interventions develop some safety mechanism to ensure the porosity of memory and yet resist the status-quoist appropriation of the same?

Madhusree Dutta: Post-youth Female Body and War

In the universe of war women’s bodies are infrastructure in multiple ways - repository of memories, locations of invasion and occasionally but not rarely, resources for resistance. I would like to deal with the instance of a specific women constituency that altered its function from being recipient of state violence, to staging organised resistance to militarisation, to perpetuating war and sex crime on behalf of their clan – within a span of 50 years. This is a less-known story of Manipur, a border land in India that are infested with militarised violence as well as clan-based identity politics. These elderly women have cultivated a militant discourse and practice built over their post-menopausal bodies and managed to elevate themselves to the political leadership. The memory of a traditional matriarchal society in the past may have helped in shaping this initiative. The contemporary artistic and activist campaign of celebrating the post-menopausal female bodies and giving them visibility in public spaces may have also enriched the agenda. Yet the prevalent politics eventually turn the initiative as a mere infrastructure in the service of patriarchy and ultra-nationalism.

Learn more about Madhusree Dutta.

Clarissa Thieme: Save the Amazon – Resumption
Between 1992 and 1996, during the Siege of Sarajevo, the film collective Save the Amazon Production developed media-activist tactics to counter ethno-nationalist narratives from inside the besieged city. Their collective filmmaking and ongoing "archival forum" — continually revisiting, discussing, and re-editing footage together — gave them agency under conditions designed to deny it. Image-making itself became a space of resistance. Save the Amazon – Resumption takes up a dialogue with that practice, growing out of Thieme's two-decade engagement with the collective and the Library Hamdija Kreševljaković Video Archive in Sarajevo. At its heart is a new archival forum: a present-day translocal network of artists, filmmakers, and activists — long-standing collaborators of Thieme sharing a feminist queer anti-fascist stance, several embedded in different diasporas, all confronting rising right-wing discourses and an authoritarian drive in their local contexts. Can the historical media-activist strategies from besieged Sarajevo inform artistic responses to their respective political contexts, and enable solidarity exchanges among them? The project unfolds through temporary collective film workshops that draw the interlocutors' practices into shared viewings and performative archiving, producing experimental filmic scores. Within asymmetrical relations — different histories, exposures, stakes — the new archival forum builds not on cohesion through resemblance, but on the perseverance of staying accountable to one another through shared filmmaking.
Clarissa Thieme is a filmmaker, artist and researcher. Her work explores a living archive as a new commons and vulnerability as the base of solidarity and resistance. Central to her practice is a collaborative mode developed over many years — most notably with the film collective Save the Amazon Production at the Library Hamdija Kreševljaković Video Archive Sarajevo, and as co-founder of The ARchipelago, an archive platform that uses augmented reality for collective archiving in the post-Yugoslav space. With Diyarbakır-based artist Rozelin Akgün, she just finished the essay film Vulnerability in Resistance and is developing the follow-up Of Gardens and Lands, which traces historical gardens in Istanbul, Diyarbakır, and Berlin as terrains of both violence and resistance. Her films have screened at Berlinale, Sarajevo Film Festival, Viennale, and Anthology Film Archives, New York. She is a film lecturer and programmer and a doctoral candidate in artistic research at mdw, Vienna. 

Ala Younis: Battles in a Future Estate 
Between 1981 and 1985, six housing and institutional complexes rose on a street in Baghdad despite the ongoing Iran-Iraq War, as part of a campaign to prepare the city to host the Non-Aligned Movement summit of 1982. Conceived as a showcase of Iraq's urban capabilities, the street's model reverberated across Arab cities, though not its story, which would encompass construction, deprivation, invasion, and restoration within four decades.
Within three months of breaking ground, each contractor was required to install an on-site exhibition of their building materials, unified across the site. This was perhaps the street's first exhibitory moment, preceding the artworks placed in its public spaces and a major arts centre that opened in 1986. In the 1990s, sanctions caused the personal libraries of academics living on the street, along with their art collections, to seep out of apartments through gradual selling. Then US military footage of apartment raids between 2004 and 2008 made those interiors publicly visible for the first time: an uninvited exposure, drastically different in register from the sentimental and familiar images residents post on social media today. Battles in a Future Estate gathers this cascade of layered history through the extensive use of media found online. 
Ala Younis is an artist, curator, and publisher exploring contested modernities in the Arab world. She exhibited globally, including at Venice and other major biennales. Younis co-founded Kayfa ta publishing, co-directed Singapore Biennale 2022, and co-led Berlinale's Forum Expanded. She holds degrees in architecture and visual cultures, currently pursuing a doctorate at the University of Oxford.