Aida Hasanović was only a child when she left a country crumbling around her. In 1993, Hasanović and her family fled Bosnia & Herzegovina, a multiethnic state torn apart by a brutal war. The conflict in Bosnia ended two years later, but not before widespread ethnic cleansing and genocide killed over 100,000 people and scattered much of the Bosnian Muslim community across the United States and Europe. 

Once the war ended, Hasanović and her family returned to Bosnia, only to find a country that was no longer safe for them. Shortly after, they emigrated to the United States, where Hasanović still resides.

Two decades later, Hasanović examines the legacy of this migration through Sending Love Back Home, a portrait of the Bosnian diaspora in which she grew up. By photographing members of the Bosnian-American community, the spaces in which they live, and the traditions they hold on to, Hasanović explores what it means to inhabit a nativistic American landscape as a Bosnian Muslim refugee. Hasanović refers to this process as “grappling with each end of the hyphen”–an endeavor to understand the interplay that occurs when Bosnian meets American. 

Presented without location information, Hasanović’s images juxtapose scenes ranging from Bosnian mountain towns to suburbs in the American Midwest. By maintaining this ambiguity, Sending Love Back Home shifts the viewer’s attention away from considerations of singular geographies and towards the strands of community woven in between. In doing so, Hasanović’s work stands as a powerful reclamation of the fragmentation of war, establishing a portrait of home that transcends a homeland.

See more of Aida’s work here.