Silent
Witness

With her book Silent Witnesses, photographer Cornelia Suhan presents a documentation as a contribution against forgetting the systematic rape of women in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The traumatizing experiences of the women are linked to specific buildings, each of which is located using geodata. Behind the facades, with their banal everydayness, lie the painful war experiences of those affected.

With this unusual approach, the book addresses sexualized violence during the war in BiH. In addition, the photographer also makes a contribution to the public condemnation and condemnation of sexualized violence against women.

»I kept driving past buildings where the crimes had been committed during my stays in Bosnia.

They are scattered all over the national territory somewhere completely innocuous on a country road, on a village street, on the grounds of a factory, the grounds of an agricultural cooperative, in a residential area in the city or on school grounds…

Abandoned, these buildings lay there; nothing indicated the crimes committed there anymore, dead walls of houses stared at me.«

– Cornelia Suhan