When the Periphery Laughs: Locality and Humor in Contemporary Art from Greece and Bosnia and Herzegovina

This article examines the use of humour in contemporary art from two nations understood as “peripheral” states within Europe: Greece and Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). Focusing on the concepts of “locality” and “visibility,” this article makes clear the way artists from both nations are framed as local narrators with a “geopolitical burden.” This burden entails the responsibility to represent national histories and trauma, often leading to a reading of art practice as over-determined through the prism of local representation and national identity. Focusing upon the work of two artists from both regions that are highly visible on the international art circuit (Stefanos Tsivopoulos and Mladen Miljanović), this article investigates the way that humour in contemporary art mediates this burden by establishing a local identity “code,” which serves to mobilize anti-nationalist politics, and problematize external normative perceptions of regions in “crisis.” In so doing, this article aims to demonstrate how humour harnesses a performance of marginality to undermine stereotypes of life under crisis, whilst offering alternative views both of each nation’s past, and its way forward into the future