This chapter is interested in the tension between lived silences in the post-war everyday and public commemoration. The concept of ‘presence of absence’ is developed in order to capture the complex ways that the traumatic past is embedded in the present. Silence is understood as an articulation of this presence of absence and the chapter explores silence as a practice and performance in the everyday of post-war Sarajevo in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The chapter reflects upon how such everyday silent memory work can be represented through public commemoration. It looks to the importance of art as an alternative realm that does not necessarily strive for closure through speech, but rather embraces a state of suspension. Aesthetic representations of presence of absence may be, the chapter concludes, a powerful means to articulate everyday memory work of silence.