The Creation and Destruction of Islamic Spaces in Bosnian Towns and Cities

Speakers:
ANDRAS RIEDLMAYER, Bibliographer in Islamic Architecture at Harvard's Fine Arts Library AZRA AKSAMIJA, Artist and doctoral student, MIT
Sponsor: European Cities Study Group
Location: Lower Level Conference Room
Center for European Studies
Directions: http://www.ces.fas.harvard.edu/about/directions.html

Contact Name: John Czaplicka
Contact Email: j.czaplicka@comcast.net The panel takes as its focus the relationship between religion, politics and space in the Balkans in the twentieth century. András Riedlmayer has documented the systematic destruction of cultural heritage in the Balkan wars of the late 20th century. In his presentation he will discuss and illustrate the formation and destruction of Islamic urban spaces in Bosnia-Herzegovina during the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian and Yugoslav periods and in the cultural and ethnic 'cleansing' of the 1992-95 war. Azra Aksamija will explore the tendencies the Bosnia's Islamic architecture in the post-socialist era and, more specifically, the attempts of the Bosnian Muslim population to negotiate its existence in an extremely complex political environment today. Aksamija will also present her research on contemporary mosque architecture and the process by which the representation of a Bosnian Islamic identity is evolving in the 21st century.  The presentations will be followed by a discussion. Azra Aksamija is an artist and architect based in Cambridge, Mass. Since 2004 she has been affiliated with Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a Ph.D. student in the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture / Department for History Theory and Criticism of Art and Architecture. Born in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1976, she graduated from the Faculty of Architecture at the TU Graz, Austria in 2001, and received her M.Arch from Princeton University, USA in 2004.  Her work has been widely published and exhibited in various contemporary art venues and biennials. She is currently researching her dissertation on contemporary Islamic architecture in post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina and the place of Islam in Europe. Home page : http://www.mit.edu/~azra/index.htm

András Riedlmayer directs the Documentation Center of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at Harvard's Fine Arts Library.  A specialist in the history and culture of the Balkans, he has spent the past decade documenting the destruction of cultural heritage in the wars in Bosnia and in Kosovo. He has testified about his findings as an expert witness before the U.N. war crimes tribunal and before the International Court of Justice in The Hague.  He is also cofounder of the Bosnian Manuscript Ingathering Project, an effort to trace and recover still-extant microfilms and photocopies representing some of the thousands of unique manuscripts and historical documents that were destroyed when archives and libraries in Bosnia were burned by nationalist extremists during the 1990s. Home page : http://www.h-net.org/people/editors/show.cgi?ID=124286