In the framework of the research project RePAST. Revisiting the Past, Anticipating the Future (H2020 grant no 769252), I am analyzing the role of contemporary artistic and cultural objects, events and practices working with the questions of memory, trauma, violence and troubling episodes from collective past as agents in analysing, criticizing and conceptualizing history and reality (after 1989). In this presentation, following the call of Marianne Hirsch and others to "explore alternative practices for mobilizing the memory of past inequities to spur progressive change" (Women Mobilizing Memory) I am offering a comparative analysis of artistic interventions in the domain of visual public memory by women artists, curators and visual activists from Poland, Kosovo, Bosnia, Ireland, Germany, Spain, Cyprus and Greece which are aimed at opening up the past, forming and transforming the memory of the conflict and of traumatic events, deconstructing and contesting dominant forms of commemoration and memory politics. I regard them as urgent and indispensable "responses to our current era of monumental memory that supports nationalist, ethnocentric, and masculinist imaginaries" (WMM). I am framing these artistic gestures as "small-scale resistances" (Mieke Bal), "middle ranges of [political and historical, K.B.] agency" (Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick) or disturbances which render history incomplete (Ariella Azoulay) in the context of the wounded cultures of historical and political conflict or post-conflict, as well as provide the visual and performative language of dissent.
