An art gallery in Belgrade, Serbia has opened the doors to one of its most unusual and challenging exhibitions to date. 

Four hundred pages of the wartime diary written by the former Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladic have gone on display at the city's Eugster gallery.

The pages have been painstakingly redrawn in English text by the Serbian artist Vladimir Miladinovic, framed and placed in neat rows around the wall of a single space in the exhibition, which has been named simply Notebook. 

"It is militarized, very cold and bureaucratic language. It speaks about the needs of the army, the problems, the ideas of how particular problems can be solved or not. So actually it's very boring from this point of view to read through this," explained Miladinovic. "In the end, we can say that it's even banal."

The original diary was one of 18 notebooks found concealed in the wall of a house in Serbia's capital Belgrade in 2010, when Mladic was on the run from war crimes investigators. 

Mladic remains one of the most controversial figures in the conflict that engulfed the Balkans in the early 1990s, when the newly independent states of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Serbia emerged from what had been former Yugoslavia. 

Nicknamed the "Butcher of Bosnia," Mladic was arrested in 2011 and put on trial.  Six years later, at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in the Hague, he was sentenced to life imprisonment for his role in the massacre of 8,000 Bosnian muslim men and boys in Srebrenica and the four-year siege of Sarajevo. 

Mladic is understood to have written in his diary every day, in which he meticulously logged the details of operations carried out by Bosnian Serb troops. The testimony he left was later used as evidence at his trial. 

Mladic remains a divisive figure in present day Serbia, where many ethnic Serbs still revere him as a national hero. 

"The work itself is trying to do something, which is the opposite of what [Serbian] society is trying to do – to forget, to deny, to erase such important issues from the past," added Miladinovic.

Mladic's second appeal against his conviction is due to be heard later this year.