Chronotopes in the Aftermath of Displacement: Traumatic Memory in Šejla Kamerić’s Body Poetic

This paper seeks to examine the artistic practice of Šejla Kamerić as a phenomenon emerging from a ‘cultural apocalypse’ as the dissolution of presence in the wake of war. The artist survived the siege of Sarajevo, and her artistic language is characterised by the presence of ‘after-images’. The artist’s use of the body as evidence serves to restore her deferred presence, which emerges in the interplay of diverse spatial and temporal dimensions through the deployment of visual strategies. In particular, the analysis seeks to comprehend the role of the body as a ‘chronotope’ as the material dimension in which time is embodied into space.