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No other European region experienced so much violence after the Second World War as South-East Europe. What traces has it left? In photos, films and installations artists now approach the history and remembrance culture of their countries. Von Carina Braun

Faces that were erased from old photos, deserted factories where the remnants of former productivity are crumbling away, monumental buildings that loom forlornly in the landscape: they are testimonies of a volatile history which the exhibition Recorded Memories/Eingeschriebene Erinnerung is showing in the Museum for Photography in Braunschweig. 23 artists from eleven South-East European states have captured in pictures their homelands’ past. The result is a collection of flashbacks and snapshots of a region that with “South-East Europe” has found a neutral geographic appellation, yet whose other name still arouses ambivalent associations: the Balkans.

Photo gallery: Recorded Memories

Anyone who speaks of “Balkan conditions” often means mafia-style structures, vendetta, chaos. The expression “balkanisation” dates back to the Ottoman era and is used quite naturally when a multi-ethnic state decomposes into its separate parts, or what some people consider them to be. Here on the fringe of Europe the First World War began, later under the cloak of a united Yugoslavia it remained generally calm – until along with Communism the state order also collapsed, old frontiers were dragged into the limelight and ethnically recharged.

The Balkan region became the scene of the most brutal conflicts in post-war Europe. Some 25,000 people died in the battle for a Croatian state: more than 100,000 people lost their lives when the Serbs fired for years at their former neighbours in the Sarajevo Basin. In South-East Europe the 20th century ended as it had begun – with war, expulsion and nationalism.

Forget your past?

Telling such a story in pictures that are not pictures of violence is no easy task. For Recorded Memories the artists chose an approach with calm, un-agitated photos and films of the collective and inherited memory that was passed from one generation to the next. “Forget your past” – demands, for example, a graffito emblazoned above the entrance to the memorial site for the Communist Party in Bulgaria. The Bulgarian Nikola Nihov has recorded the fate of old Communist monuments with his camera.

Other pictures show peripheral sites of history that over the years have become themselves unofficial monuments: Belgrade’s nationalistic architecture as a remnant of a ruling ideology committed to visibility, the streets of Sarajevo in the year 1989 when the insecurity of the years to come first reared its head. The Rumanian Stefan Sava filmed a poetry recital in the slaughterhouse of Bucharest where, during the Second World War, Jews were tortured to death und hanged from butcher’s hooks. Other artists chose a personal approach and searched for traces of the past in photo albums and in ancient chests of drawers: old family photos and faded documents are records of history beyond dates and facts.

Recorded Memories is sequel to the literature project Daring to Remember for which well-known authors explored the conflicts in South-East Europe in poems and texts. Then words were found, now it is pictures that raise the questions as to how best to deal with the past. Memory is that which, at some point, remains of history.