Milica Tomić

prevailing political discourses, violence-producing processes and the meaning of war are all reflected and subjected to questioning in her artistic works. Her analyses of situations and of ideological mechanisms, analyses that aim to ascertain the positions, instruments and vocabulary involved in the production of discourse, reveal new insights and conclusions regarding a complex network of relationships. One of the works that provides a good impression of the artist’s working practice is the project “Container,” in which the criminal act that took place in northern Afghanistan was reconstructed and reenacted. Tomić points out that, in analyzing the process by which they reconstructed the crime that took place in northern Afghanistan, she and her colleagues realized that all the tools they had used to do so (buying a container, hiring professional police units to riddle it with bullets, the weapons and bullets themselves, etc.), as well as the simulated conditions, pointed to local involvement in a systematic, global network of violence.¹ In identifying mechanisms for the construction and maintenance of hegemonic attitudes and representations, Tomić addresses acts that, in most cases, are forced by the state and by international organizations—which, for their part, define precisely these acts as being criminal according to existing laws. So Tomić muses as to how it would be if she, as an artist, reclaimed the right to question the state’s right to determine the narrative with regard to a crime, hence also reclaiming the right to proclaim, reflect upon, textualize, and determine what constitutes this crime.”² Another important topic that Tomić reflects upon in her works is the question of identity. As an artist born in a country that no longer exists, she analyses the processes of building and re-building identity and value systems, as well as the shifting of power structures and their centers of attention, in works such as “I am Milica Tomić” (1998/99) and “Façade Project” (2000). A.B.