Travel Tip: Art and Archaeology in Austria
Azra Akšamija: The Mosque as Ethnic Body

In her interdisciplinary practice, Azra Akšamija investigates the potency of art and architecture to facilitate the process of transformative mediation in cultural or political conflicts, and in so doing, provide a framework for researching, analyzing, and intervening in contested socio-political realities. Her lecture examines the intertwined relationship between nationalism, architecture and the body in the context of the 1992- 1995 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Focusing on mosque architecture, she will show how nationalist extremists seized on cultural heritage to facilitate the long-lasting breakdown of Bosnia’s cosmopolitan society. She argues that the extent and the genocidal nature of war violence has transformed the meaning of the mosque from that of a place of worship to that of the ethnic body of the Bosniak nation.

Azra Akšamija is a Sarajevo born Austrian artist and architectural historian, currently Assistant Professor in the Art, Culture and Technology Program, Massachusetts Institute Technology (Cambridge, USA)