18”x13” portrait of Tito, cut into the shape of Yugoslavia. I used 8 colors, and in total the piece is about 654,000 stitches
Detail shot of Bosnia, Croatia and Slovenia
Josip Broz Tito, the architect of modern Yugoslavia
Tito was the leader of Communist Yugoslavia from the end of the Second World War until his death in 1980. Although there were many positives of his reign - many people still remember Tito’s presidency fondly - he did not ultimately manage to balance the ethnic tensions among the many groups that composed Yugoslavia.
His mandate was that the people of Yugoslavia were Yugoslavs first, before their specific ethnicity. However, the policies of the Communist Yugoslav Party did treat the different religions and ethnicities differently. This created an environment where people did not properly process the often-fraught past of the region between the different groups, and as a result many resentments got built up that could only release when Tito was no longer in power. Even though he was a ‘benevolent’ dictator, he was a dictator nonetheless. This meant that he could not conceive stepping down from power, and as a result there was a power and order vacuum after his death. This enabled a lot of the aggressors of the dissolution fo Yugoslavia to sneak themselves into positions of power. Often, in order to get there, these new ‘leaders’ would manipulate the simmering ethnic tensions, creating the conditions for an ethnic/civil war.
Portrait of Bill Clinton, 65”x65” overall, with far too many stitches to count. This picture is from the Garbage Person exhibit on view 5/6-7/31 2022 in Gallery C3 in Charlotte, NC. The portrait is accompanied with 5 soft sculptures (felt, beads and batting with machine embroidered details) of bombs used during the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia.
Detail of the text embroidered on the portrait (full transcript to follow).
Detail of in-progress pieces
Details of embroidered text and assembly of the panels.
Transcript of the text embroidered on the stripes of Bill Clinton’s flag
Mr. Clinton has had a huge impact on my life. I am among many millions of other people in Somalia, Rwanda, Afghanistan, Northern Ireland, Russia, China, the Balkans (I count all of “my” people on all sides of the war), Israel, Iraq, Iran, Vietnam, North Korea, Japan, India, Haiti, Mexico, Cuba and Americans who - I would wager - could trace their own life’s journey back to something that Mr. Clinton did.
What a powerful man.
How does someone get so much power?
Bullies only understand force, and aren’t leaders most often the biggest bullies of any group? The US understands intervention in global conflicts only in terms of force. Maybe that’s because that’s how they got their power and influence in the first place. Maybe it’s because our stupid brains are doomed to repeat the same cycles of oppression forever.
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I left Yugoslavia 6 months before the 1999 NATO bombing campaign began on March 24th, 1999. It wasn’t my choice: my mother got an unmissable opportunity in Paris, and we quickly packed 2-3 suitcases each and left in September of 1998. Although it was emotionally painful, the move wasn’t too taxing on us physically - my mother was now an ex-pat. That meant that I would get to go to fancy schools, and our material needs were taken care of.
Because I left Belgrade right before the bombing, I was having drastically different life experiences than my family and friends back home. It became harder to interact with them - I could sense a resentment from them that I wasn’t there with them; I was lucky enough to escape. It might have been my guilt that invented this divide, but whether it was real or not for others, it was real for me. I began to craft an identity that left out “Serb” entirely. When I moved to the US in 2000, I repeated the process of assimilation and did it more quickly (albeit not any less painfully than the first round) and very successfully. My origins became a dirty secret I carried with me, I became an American - a thing many all around the world can only dream of.
I had “studied” English and French in school in Belgrade, but I was woefully unprepared for navigating the Parisian linguistic landscape. Whenever I opened my mouth to speak, people would laser in on my slavic accent and the interrogation would begin: where was I from, how long had I been in Paris, etc. Whenever my inquisitors heard my answers, a quick insult would ensue. A butcher once called me “dirty”. It became pretty clear that I needed to assimilate quickly if I wanted to avoid inviting negative attention.
My first friend was a Korean girl who came to Paris by herself. Her family sent her to study the cello - maybe violin? Anyway, she barely spoke English, and I acted as her interpreter. I wish I could remember this friendship better. I wish I could find Im Hye and hear her perspective of what our friendship had looked like to her.
The most painful interrogation I got about my country of origin was from an American classmate. Her father was in France on diplomatic business of some sort. She never gave me much attention normally - she seemed dangerously assertive with other kids so I just stayed away.
I don’t remember this girl’s name (it was something horribly American), but I will never forget that one lunch I had with her. She sat down across the table from me, and without any warning she opened up with “so, can you explain to me what’s happening with your country?” I don’t remember what I said to her, but I know that she followed up with “my dad told me that all Serbs are bad people and criminals”. This went on for a while. I don’t remember a fight of any sort, I must have agreed with her to a certain extent.
In the meantime, President Bill Clinton was getting impeached.
The US stepped in years after fighting had been going on, and Mr. Clinton didn’t seem to get interested in the conflict until 1998, 8 years into fighting, during the second “episode” of the war, 3 years after the US had brokered the famed Dayton Accord. Many claim, and I happen to think they’re right, that Clinton pushed for the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia (which was coincidentally blocked by the UN and therefore an illegal act of aggression in the eyes of international law) to distract from his impeachment trial, and heaps of legal trouble he was in before and after the trial.
Detail of in-progress panels
Arkan and Ceca at their wedding
Zeljko “Arkan” Raznjatovic was one of the most notorious Serb criminals before the war broke out in Yugoslavia. He was also the head of one of the most brutal paramilitary troops that fought in both the Bosnia conflict as well as in Kosovo.
You can see a mock-up of an embroidered portrait of Arkan during the war in Bosnia with his paramilitaries, the “Tigers”.
Ceca, his wife you see in this portrait, still is one of the of the most popular turbo folk singers. During the 90’s, this couple was one of the biggest celebrity power couples in Serbia, and the way they presented themselves glamorized the violence of Serb nationalism. They were gendered nationalist celebrities. Ceca was one of the few pop stars who had shows outside the country at the time (and to this day) - she stoked the emigrants (called “gastarbeiters”) in Germany and elsewhere in Europe to continue supporting the Serb aggression in Bosnia. Arkan owned the Red Star Soccer Club (as well as some clubs and an ice cream parlor (which, I suppose deviates from his masculine image)), and he recruited many of the ultras to fight for the Tigers.
I decided to include them both in this portrait, because their influence was so intertwined and each one of them supported the other’s nationalist posturing. This picture is from their wedding, which was itself nationalist theater.
Overall diamond-cut pattern piece is 40”x73”, 72 panels total with 20 colors
each panel is 8”x5 1/2” embroidered, about 80,000 stitches, and 16 colors
Slobodan Praljak’s suicide by poisoning at his ICTY sentence hearing.
Praljak was a Bosnian intellectual with a Croat ethnic background. He joined the Croat paramilitary organization after the Yugoslav army dissolved - the Croatian Defense council.
He was not the most virulent of all the war criminals that I am embroidering, but he did make a big campaign among the intellectual class of Bosniak Croats to join the war effort, and for that I think that he is especially toxic. Both before and after the war, he worked as an artist and teacher of philosophy.
He surrendered to the Hague in 2004 for his participation in the ethnic cleansing of Bosniaks during the Yugoslav civil war as a major military figure, and he chose to defend himself without a lawyer. He was convicted in 2013, and finally sentenced to 20 years in 2017. The court subtracted the years it took to prosecute him from his sentence, leaving him with mere 9 years to serve. Rather than face the consequences of his actions, he chose to die a rather dramatic death.
He drank poison at the court from a small vial that he smuggled into the courthouse. You can see a video of his poisoning here. He died the next day.
In 2008, the Croat Ministry of Culture pronounced his books as nothing but 'pornographic propaganda pamphlets’ in support of his criminal activity, and charged him with a €600,000+ fine.
Ratko Mladic
He is a Serb who led the Serbian paramilitary troops as a general during the war in Republika Srpska, a territory of Bosnia. His main goal was to ethnically cleanse the region of its Muslim population, which some nationalist Serbs saw as rightfully theirs.
He worked closely with Radovan Karadzic in his efforts, and was a major figure in the Srebrenica massacre.
After the war, he remained a free man at large for 16 years, and was only captured after the EU made his arrest along with a series of other former war criminals a condition for Serbia to join the EU. He was arrested in 2011, and convinced at the ICTY in 2017 where he is serving his life sentence. He survived a heart attack in prison, and had an appeal trial last year, which he seems to luckily have lost. His arrest happened the same day the EU representative visited Serbia for a review of the country’s standing.
Out of all the characters, he may be the driest evil of them all, yet I wanted to include him because to Serbian nationalists the world over he is a representative of their absolution.
The image I chose to fracture is Mladic’s iconic portrait from the war, and I believe this may actually have been taken at Srebrenica right before the massacre took place.
in total, this piece is 30”x40”, the panels are 8”x8”, 8”x4”, and 4”4” - 28 panels total. 1,000,000 stitches total
Each panel is 8”x5 1/2”, and about 100,000 stitches. Both images are from Mladic’s and Karadzic’s respective ICTY trials at the Hague.
Each panel is 4”x4” (top row is 2”x4”), and about 25,000 stitches each
Radovan Karadzic
Karadzic was a psychiatrist before the war - he even studied at Columbia university apparently. When he finished his studies he settled in Sarajevo, where he started a psychiatry practice. He falsified documents for criminals who wanted to plead insanity at their trial, and people who wanted to retire early and needed proof of certain medical conditions. For these crimes, he went to jail in 1984.
When the war began, he became the president of Republika Srpska - the supposedly Serbian part of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Shortly before the outbreak of the war, he founded the Serbian Democratic Party, which aimed at organizing and inciting Serbian nationalists.
During the war, he was the architect of many of the worst atrocities committed against Bosnians. He and Mladic organized most of the ethnic cleansing that happened in the region.
After the war, he evaded the authorities supposedly for 13 years. He was found in 2013 in Belgrade (again only after the EU put pressure on Serbia to deliver on the war criminals in exchange for economic support), disguised as a new age and sex health guru.
The fractured portrait you see is an image of him at his arrest, when he had a long beard and top-knot to enhance his image as said guru.
On 24 March 2016, he was found guilty of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, and sentenced to 40 years imprisonment. He tried to appeal in 2019, and the court rejected his appeal and raised his sentence to life imprisonment.
Slobodan Milosevic
This man is the worst of the worst. He was the president of Serbia, then Yugoslavia.
He died in prison from a supposed heart attack after a visit from his doctor, at the behest of his wife, Mira Markovic (who survives him in exile in Russia)
