In late July, Denis Bojic, the director of the Republika Srpska Memorial Centre, told the Serbian daily newspaper Politika: “The politics of memory is a means of survival.”

Bojic was commenting on the Centre’s recent campaign in New York, in which billboards bearing photographs and accounts testifying to the ‘suffering’ of the Serb people travelled through Manhattan.

Bojic’s words offered perhaps the clearest explanation of the campaign’s political significance. If Republika Srpska, the predominantly Serb-populated entity of Bosnia and Herzegovina, were denied the right to tell the world about Serb suffering, he said, it would mean “the end of the existence of Republika Srpska”.

‘Learn About Serbian Suffering’ was presented in New York on July 10 and 11 by the Memorial Centre, a public institution established by the Republika Srpska government in 2024. 

According to the organisers, the exhibition appeared at a number of prominent locations in the city, including near the headquarters of the United Nations. A QR code was displayed, directing interested passers-by to a digital collection of testimonies and archival material.

Even the timing of the exhibition was political.