On 11 September 1993, respected war reporter Robert Fisk walked into a decimated mosque in Bosnia and commented on camera, 'When I see things like this, I wonder what the Muslim world has in store for us.'¹ The destruction of religious emblems and artefacts is nothing new.

Towards the end of the Roman Empire, there is evidence to suggest that widespread iconoclasm accompanied the forcible replacement of paganism with Christianity.² In contemporary Kosovo - where an estimated 863,000 Kosovo Albanians (90% of the ethnic group population) were expelled and at least 100,000 Serbs (accounting for half the former Serbian population) were forced to flee retaliation - many Serbian orthodox churches have been destroyed as a symbol of the Serbian rule that the Kosovo war sought to end.³ Serbian artist Ivan Grubanov recently completed a series of drawings that hint at an inventory of the icons lost to posterity during this rout. With delicate lines, he traced the fragmented outlines of cupolas and captured the chains of frescoed saints, simultaneously stripping the source material of its potency. The motivation behind the Afterimages series (2006) does not, however, seem to be confined to empathy with his countrymen in their enforced exodus or outrage at any sacrilegious intent (Grubanov has noted the 'evil Christian European heritage' of Serbia).⁴ Neither does this work seem to be concerned with religion per se, but with the systematic erasure of symbols that hold meaning for particular groups of people. Grubanov's nascent practice reads as an attempt to understand something about the underlying impulses that give rise to destructive behaviour, which warrants further investigation.

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