Note on the Cover Artist

Abstract

Taida Kusturica is an artist from Bosnia and currently a PhD student in Philosophy at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. ‘My design for the cover of the British Journal of Aesthetics emerged out of a black and white film taken on the streets of Sarajevo in the aftermath of the war. The whole of Sarajevo is marked by these ruptures, caused by the explosion of mortars landing on concrete, and subsequently filled with red resin. They are called Sarajevo Roses because the fragmentation pattern looks almost floral in shape. Because Sarajevo was a site of intense urban warfare and suffered thousands of shell explosions during the siege that lasted almost four years, the marked concrete patterns are a unique feature to the city. Today, Sarajevo Roses have become touristic landmarks, and are meant to symbolise the horror of war and aggression. This subject remains my preoccupation in art and theory: the question of how it is possible to represent war, and the question of how a memory of the past can be connected to the future. Yugoslavia does not exist anymore today, many memories were destroyed by the war, and now art is the only language in which the reality of the past can be represented.’