List of programs

The online discussion “Non-aligned Yugoslav modernism: between culture, economy and politics” will be held on Thursday at 6 pm and can be followed live on the YouTube channel of the Museum of Yugoslavia. The reason for the discussion is Bojana Videkanić’s book “Nonaligned Modernism”. In addition to the author, the participants will be Ana Dević, sociologist, Jelena Vesić, art historian and Tanja Petrović, anthropologist. The moderator is Ana Panić, art historian and curator of the Museum of Yugoslavia, co-author of the current exhibition “Prometheans of the New Century”, inspired by the 60th anniversary of the First Conference of the Non-Aligned Movement in Belgrade.

During the debate, cultural and artistic production in Yugoslavia will be discussed, viewed in the broader political context of self-government and non-alignment. Also, the specifics of Yugoslav modernism will be discussed, its hybrid forms and the attitude towards other cultural models throughout the Western world and the Global South, as well as the creation of a kind of transnational postcolonial culture through cooperation within the Movement.

The author will present the basic ideas of the book and her methodological and theoretical starting points, while Ana Dević will talk about how we can consider this transnational artistic and cultural interaction as an alternative “from the bottom”, if the Non-Aligned Movement was conceived as cooperation between states (“from the top”). Tanja Petrović will focus on how to think about Yugoslav modernism and art production, in general, in socialist Yugoslavia outside the normative framework set by art history, while Jelena Vesić will talk about the book in the context of recent representations of Yugoslav art based on postcolonial theory, global and horizontal approach to writing art histories and observing art in a broader political context.

The discussion can be followed on the museum’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBSqysjy-LeEWlRJwZLl75Q and will be an accompanying program of the exhibition “Prometheans of the New Century”, which focuses on the relations between Yugoslavia and India in the field of art and culture, created in the context of non-alignment policy. The exhibition is open until November 14, 2021.

About the participants:

Bojana Videkanić is an art historian and artist. She teaches modern and contemporary art, visual culture and extended media at the University of Waterloo, at the Department of Fine Arts in Canada. The focus of her work is modern and contemporary art in socialist Yugoslavia. The book “Nonaligned Modernism” was published in 2020 by the McGill-Queens University Press.

Tanja Petrović is a researcher at the Institute of Culture and Memory Studies ZRC SAZU. She is interested in the meanings and use of socialist heritage in post-Yugoslav societies and the cultural, linguistic, political and social processes that shape the reality of these societies.

Ana Dević is an associate professor of sociology. She teaches at the University Business Academy in Novi Sad and the University of Bologna. She is an associate at the Catholic University of Leuven. Her areas of research are nationalism and social disintegrations, the political right and gender issues, collective memory and revisionisms of memory (especially war crimes), social movements and political engagement in the art in socialism and post-socialism.

Jelena Vesić is an independent curator, critic and lecturer, co-editor of the magazine for image and politics Prelom 2001-2010 and the magazines Red Thread (Istanbul) and Art Margins (MIT press) since 2009. She is active in the field of publishing, research and exhibition practice that intersects political theory and contemporary art. She deals with the relationship between art and ideology in the field of geopolitical writing of art histories with a focus on experimental artistic and exhibition practices of the 1960s and 1970s in the former Yugoslavia and Eastern Europe.

  • Day: 04.11-04.11.2021
  • Time: 18:00

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