Missing Lives

Nov 8th, 2014 - Feb 1st, 2015

Commissioned by the International Committee of the Red Cross, in collaboration with author Rory Maclean. Photographs by Nick Danziger.

Based on the book by the same name, Missing Lives shows the work the International Committee of the Red Cross and other organizations have undertaken to trace 34,278 missing men, women and children during the war in the Balkans between 1991 and 1995. 

The photographic exhibit specifically documents and commemorates the personal stories of fifteen families whose relatives disappeared during the wars of the former Yugoslavia in 1990s.

In villages, thousands of people were forcibly evacuated.  In many cases, few escaped. The war spared no one. Tens of thousands of men, women and children were murdered and remain unaccounted for.

For the first time in war, DNA has been used to match remains from mass graves, reuniting family members and provide some sense of closure. Anthropologists and forensic scientists have spent years helping to identify the missing. To this day, more than 15,000 people remain unaccounted for. 

Under the terms of the Geneva Convention and the peace treaties that ended the war, the governments of the Western Balkans have an obligation to search for and identify the remains of the missing. The ICRC urges governments to search for and provide answers to wars greatest tragedy.  

Nick Danziger is an award-winning photographer and documentary film maker. Danziger has done over 40 documentary films for the BBC. Photographs often appear in Time and Newsweek magazines.

Rory MacLean was born in Vancouver and raised in Toronto. Maclean is an award-winning travel writer and critically acclaimed blogger for the Goethe Institute in Berlin.

The community is invited to attend the opening on Tuesday, November 11 from Noon to 4:30 pm. Free admission applies.

International Committee of the Red Cross International Committee of the Red Cross

Established in 1863, the ICRC is an impartial, neutral and independent organization whose exclusively humanitarian mission is to protect the lives and dignity of victims of armed conflict and other situations of violence and to provide them with assistance.

The ICRC operates worldwide, helping people affected by conflict and armed violence and promoting the laws that protect victims of war. It does so through its direct action around the world, as well as by encouraging the development of international humanitarian law (IHL) and promoting respect for it by governments and all weapon bearers.

Its mandate stems essentially from the Geneva Conventions of 1949. Based in Geneva, Switzerland, the ICRC employs some 13,000 people in more than 80 countries. The ICRC is funded mainly by voluntary donations from governments and from national Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.

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