To mark Human Rights Day 2025, the Mitchell Institute is partnering with the Human Rights Centre and the Transitional Justice Cluster at QUB, to offer two events on 8 December. The events – a Lecture and a Film Screening - are part of the Northern Ireland Human Rights Festival taking place 7-13 December 2025.

Both events are rooted in the lived experience of the Srebrenica genocide and its aftermath and explore the role of the creative arts as a response to human rights violations.

Threads as Voices of Memory

Speaker: Selma Ćatović Hughes

In this Lecture, Threads as Voices of Memory: Visual methodology for narrating trauma between body, site of memory, and tactile nature of (in)tangible narratives, Selma Ćatović Hughes will explore how using visual methodology in meaning-making artistic practice can transform traumatic memory into narrative memory and facilitate a social platform for individual and collective healing, remembrance, and resilience.

Transforming personal traumatic memories and utilizing creative frameworks, individual threads of memory are reassembled into a collective narrative that allows for documenting voices of the past and present and enabling public discourse about contested history, ongoing mass violence, and violations of human rights.

Selma draws on her personal traumatic war-time experience from Bosnia and Herzegovina and ongoing investigation into human rights violations and oppressive regimes in other countries, such as South Africa, Chile, and Palestine.

The shared principle of women as activists through daily vernacular activities has been visible and impactful around the world: the patchwork quilts from a small rural community of descendants of the black slaves in Gee’s Bend, Alabama, USA; the apartheid embroidery from South Africa; arpilleras, the traditional artwork of appliqué and embroidery narrating stories from the dictatorship in Chile; tatreez, the traditional embroidery in Palestine as a tool to fight systematic erasure and support resistance.

With the focus on collaborative movements in textile art, a series of examples demonstrate social activism that is empowering and impactful, transcending geographical, ethnic and language borders.

Selma Ćatović Hughes

Selma Ćatović Hughes (b. 1977) grew up in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. She holds Master in Architecture from UC Denver and BA in Architecture from the University of New Mexico. Her ongoing research about memory began as a subconscious form of therapy and her artistic practice of visual arts is a collection of individual and collective voices of memory.

Selma has been an active participant in a number of conferences and academic writings that delve into issues of transitional justice accountability, difficult histories, and identity. As a recipient of several awards and research grants in collaboration with established institutions pursuing justice, peace, and sustainable future, she has been awarded the Paul Ré Peace Prize, the Lifetime Achievement Award for Historical Healing Through Art and her work ‘A Series of Tactile Memory’ was awarded Public Prize at the Biennal de Ceramica d’Esplugues, Spain.

Currently Selma is a doctoral researcher in Cultural History at the University of Turku, Finland.

Further information and registration here.