rich in historical complexity. The ‘thug’ in the work’s
Other examples of enmeshed
title references a mythical cult of Indian murderers
who became a pretext for predictive policing during
the British colonial rule with lasting effects in the
contemporary world.
The ‘Exposing Territories’ programme assembled
by de Witt deepens and extends reflections of racism,
history, archiving and memory. Critic and artist
Morgan Quaintance’s Missing Time, 2019, is one of
his most convincing and resolved moving-image works,
seamlessly fusing a case of alien abduction with issues
around Britain’s colonial history in Kenya and the
forgetting that engulfs it. Onyeka Igwe’s No Archive
Can Restore You offers a glimpse at a rotting film
archive in Nigeria, with film reels lost to mounds
of dust and chemical degradation (Profile AM439).
Miranda Pennell’s Strange Object continues her previous
archival-essayistic film work, this time exploring the
connections between the imaging technologies of aerial
photography and the disembodied violence of modern
warfare. Here, early RAF images of Somaliland a
hundred years ago both document sites of resistance
by the forces of Mohammed Abdullah Hassan and
map out their destruction from above by the British
colonial forces.
Curated by Perks, the ‘Speculative Futures’ pro-
gramme continues her wider curatorial work on
socio-political issues of affect, desire and performance.
‘Speculative Futures’ is described in the online press
blurb as consisting of works that ‘have a stake in this
planet and demand a request for a better tomorrow’.
High ambitions indeed. One focus here is the voices
of youth in rethinking the future, notably in Stanya
Kahn’s No Go Backs, which centres on the past, present
and future ecological crises of California, and Matt
Hulse’s Sound for the Future, which explores the film-
makers’ youthful non-career in The Hippies, the band
he formed with his siblings in the late 1970s. The latter
is hardly as radical as the rest of the programme
aspires to be, but it does hint at gentler forms of
performative resistance. Mikhail Karikis’s Ferocious
Love centres on a group of young adults in a post-
apocalyptic future, all filmed in a style I can best
describe as Brechtian BBC, with stilted performances
and mise-en-scene that foreground the textual above
the dramaturgical. Less successful in the exploration
of youth’s destabilising or resistance forces was Down
There The Sea Folk Live, Stan Greengrass’ somewhat
literal video on transgender performance, and Gaby
Sahhar’s atomised urban-noir Truth and Kinship.
Works here were at their utopian best when they
pointed away from the first-person ‘I’ to a collective
‘we’. Rhea Storr’s Here is the Imagination of the Black
Radical, for example, points to that rich terrain of the
Bakhtinian carnival as a site of resistance in public
space, while Jacqueline Lentzou’s The End of Suffering
is a sci-fi dream in the vein of Chris Marker’s epistolary
works: a young woman weeps; she can’t stop; her sobs
are answered by a voice from the sky; it is a Martian
voice that berates humankind’s search for reasons and
narrative cohesion, pointing forward to new global
The screening of ‘diverse’ works might merely appease rather
than change institutions. The best works at this year’s Festival throw
that critical awareness back at the audience, implicating us all.
38 Art Monthly no. 442, December 2020 – January 2021
forms of co-existence.
empathy include Adonia Bouchehri’s odd and affecting
Jello, a lockdown gem capturing a process of self-other-
ing as a first-person narrator begins to fantasise about
leaving the suffocating confines of her apartment and
joining a pack of rats, running free, and Ann Oren’s
Passage, which features a beguiling queer performance
in which a naked foley artist transforms into a horse
by mimicking the animal’s tail-swish, snorts and hoof
clip-clops. Such works point us towards a collective
space of solidarity and difference, a place that is
captured too loosely by those static nouns ‘cinema’
and ‘art’.
Colin Perry is a senior lecturer in Fine Art at Arts
University Bournemouth. His forthcoming book
is titled Radical Mainstream: Independent Film,
Video and Television in Britain, 1974–1990.
Jasmila Žbanić: Quo Vadis, Aida?
8,372. Eight thousand, three hundred and seven-
ty-two. That is the number of fathers, grandfathers,
brothers, sons, husbands, uncles, cousins, friends,
neighbours and lovers Bosnian women lost during
the mass murder and genocide at the hands of Ratko
Mladić’s Bosnian Serb Army in Srebrenica in July
1995. Jasmila Žbanić’s new feature film, Quo Vadis,
Aida?, conveys this devastating moment in European
history from a feminist perspective, centring the
weight of this ethnic cleansing on the shoulders of
one female Bosnian protagonist, Aida (Jasna Đuričić),
a middle-aged school teacher and mother who serves
as an interpreter for the UN forces stationed in
Srebrenica. In what seems to be just one or two hectic
days filled with incessant cruelties, Aida loses
everything, despite beseeching every man in charge
to save her sons and husband from execution: UN
generals, UN soldiers and a UN doctor, in addition to
young Serbian soldiers who were her students before
the war and who still respectfully call her ‘teacher’,
despite their menacing power over her life. In Žbanić’s
film, Aida’s feverish yet ultimately futile struggle
to save her family exposes the ways in which the
Serbian military and the United Nations Protection
Force were both run by men who abandoned their
sense of humanity. Žbanić’s thesis seems clear: war
is gendered and masculinity is its killing force,
sparing neither women nor men from its brutality.
But the film doesn’t settle with this demoralising
diagnosis of war. Instead, Žbanić offers up a bro-
ken-hearted heroine, whose despondent and trauma-
tised gaze signifies the courage and perseverance
war survival requires of its living victims.
The film premiered at the 2020 Venice Film Festival
and has since been screened internationally, earning
numerous awards, including the UNIMED Award 2020
in Venice, the International Competition at the Antalya
Golden Orange Film Festival and the El Gouna Star
award for best narrative. In addition, it is Bosnia’s

Quo Vadis, Aida?, 2020, directed by Jasmila Žbanić
official submission for the Best International
Feature Film at the 2021 Academy Awards.
In Bosnia, the first screening was at the Memorial
Centre in Srebrenica, the very site of the film, to
an audience that included many witnesses and survi-
vors from 1995. Žbanić’s film honours their fates and
reminds us that there is no ‘safe zone’ in war. Despite
the fact that Srebrenica had been declared a safe zone
by 1995, the UN did next to nothing to stop the Serb
army from displacing some 30,000 residents and
killing 8,372 of its Bosnian men. Scenes of general
Mladić (Boris Isaković) making false promises to his
frightened local captives are paired with scenes of
incompetency and cowardice from Dutch UN soldiers.
Intimidated by the Serb forces, the official protectors
of Srebrenica time and again caved to Serbian military
bravado. In one such piercing scene, a young and
inexperienced UN soldier ends up exposing an adoles-
cent boy, who, dressed up with a scarf and in women’s
clothes, had slipped past the Serbian radar with his
mother. The UN soldier’s obedient exclamation,
‘Hey, that’s a man!’, meant death for the youth, who
is separated from his crying and begging mother as
she screams: ‘Give me back my child!’ The scene doesn’t
end with the mother in agony, but with the young UN
soldier crying, overwhelmed by the weight of responsi-
bility and perhaps horrified by his own submission
to the gendered violence imposed by the Serb army.
Žbanić highlights how the destructive masculinity
of war hurts everyone, including men.
There are no war heroes in Žbanić’s film. Instead,
she privileges stories of strong Yugoslav women, an
emphasis that is widely missing from narratives of the
Yugoslav wars. For example, the economist Čamila ends
up in a team of people who meet with Mladić to negoti-
ate the next steps. While her body is subject to inappro-
priate comments and searches by the Serbian military,
one of them menacingly joking ‘women are most
dangerous’, she sees through Mladić’s deceptive assur-
ances. Nihad, Aida’s husband, however, wants to trust
the Serbian leader. Frustrated with Čamila’s resistance,
he exclaims: ‘I can’t stand stupid women.’
In Quo Vadis, Aida?, women are powerless against
such fatal faith in patriarchal kindness; they know it
to be a Trojan Horse. The film ends with Aida back at
school, years later, teaching a new generation of young
children whose parents include both perpetrators and
survivors of the Srebrenica genocide. Žbanić leaves us
with one inescapable truth: if patriarchy is the proven
champion of war, then feminism is its anti-hero.
As the camera pauses on Aida’s knowing gaze, we are
left to contemplate the burden of her monumental task.
Jasmina Tumbas is assistant professor in the depart-
ment of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies,
University at Buffalo.
Art Monthly no. 442, December 2020 – January 2021
Polemic
Lottery Lives
Current art-funding schemes, despite their merito-
cratic veneer, remain incurably unjust. It is time,
says Michaële Cutaya, for a radical shake-up.
Most critics of meritocracy focus on its failure to live
up to the ideal of offering equal opportunities to rise
according to one’s own merit and hard work. In his
2020 book The Tyranny of Merit, What’s Become of the
Common Good?, however, Michael J Sandel takes issue
with the concept of meritocracy itself: that we are
responsible for our fate and succeed through our own
doing, just as when we fail we have no one to blame
but ourselves. He takes Michael Young’s 1958 dystopian
vision The Rise of the Meritocracy as a cautionary tale.
Young, writing as a 2033 historian, sums up what could
go wrong if the meritocratic ideal is carried through:
‘Today all persons, however humble, know they have
had every chance … Are they not bound to recognise
that they have an inferior status – not as in the past
because they were denied opportunity; but because they
are inferior? For the first time in human history the
inferior man has no ready buttress for his self-regard.’
Young ends his story by predicting a populist revolt
in 2034 of the less-educated classes against the merito-
cratic elites. We may be slightly ahead of schedule.
As a professor at Harvard, Sandel is concerned by
how the ‘great talent hunt’ that meritocracy demands
has turned ‘higher education into a hyper-competitive
sorting contest’. The credentialing function of colleges
and universities is overwhelming their educational
mission. In response, he proposes to ‘chasten merit’s
hubris’ in summoning chance and pointing out that
who happens to possess the talents that a society values
at a given time is just as much a matter of chance as
being born in affluence or poverty. Even the ability to
take on hard work will rely on a whole set of circum-
stances that have little to do with one’s own merit. He
thus argues that for the admission process to universi-
ties to reflect the arbitrariness of the distribution of
life’s gifts they should adopt a lottery of the qualified.
Among the many issues that the impact of the 2020
Covid-19 pandemic has brought up, or perhaps rather
recast, is the remit of public arts funding. The expecta-
tions of what arts councils should do to support the
arts have, vastly expanded – and so have, to various
degrees, their budgets. Sensing that this represents a
not-to-be-missed opportunity, we, a small group of art
practitioners, decided to draft proposals to be discussed
with the Arts Council of Ireland that addressed some
of the shortcomings in the application process which
we felt would improve their relationship with the arts
community.
Two things happened: one was that, though we
aimed to focus on simple practical changes, we quickly
realised that we had opened up wider questions exceed-
ing what a letter could achieve. The other was that in
speaking with artists to gather their experiences and
insights, we touched on not just frustration and annoy-
ance with the application process but also unexpected
levels of despondency – and not only from those who
can be all-too-handily framed as ‘losers’ struggling
with the administrative requirements of making
an application for instance, but also from those we
might have expected to be the designated ‘winners’,
the up-and-coming, credentialled artists in this
39