Alumna Novka Ćosović (MArch 2013) takes part in this year’s line up for Nuit Blanche with a large-scale art installation that reminds us how media representations of trauma have become a background subject to daily life.

Entitled The Museum, the piece is closely linked to her graduate thesis of the same name. Accoring to Ćosović (and as described in an earlier article on her work):

Acts of violence and trauma captured in the media have one common denominator: their backgrounds. Prisoners of war have been held in school gymnasiums; dead bodies have been piled high in swimming pools; bathrooms have been turned into slaughter houses. The backgrounds in each setting include tiles, wallpaper, curtains — the architecture of our everyday lives. Normally benign settings, ‘domestic-institutional-communal spaces’ become perverted by war and violence.

At Nuit Blanche, Ćosović will present her idea of “perverted spaces” through an installation that appears to be a typical swimming pool. This pool, however, represents one that was once used as a morgue during the Yugoslavian war. Visitors are invited to lounge within her makeshift “pool” as they watch news clips of warfare played out within highly domesticated and communal backgrounds/spaces in places such as the former Yugoslavia, East Timor, Rwanda, and Syria.

Ćosović is an MArch graduate and currently splits her time between working for Community and writing for Site Magazine. The Museum can be viewed at Artscape Youngplace on the night of Nuit Blanche this October 1st.