Contemporary Art in the Post-Yugoslav Space

This edited volume is centered on the production, discussion, and consumption of contemporary art in the post-Yugoslav space now. Authors in this volume demonstrate how and why contemporary art discourses have continued to overcome chronic difficulties in local cultural economies since the dissolution of the common federal space of socialist Yugoslavia. This book focuses on socialist Yugoslavia's prevailing cultural legacies of anti-fascism, non-alignment, queer and feminist movements, and socially engaged art, which inform and shape contemporary critiques of neoliberal capitalist conditions in the arts. Chapters are rooted in ongoing global challenges in contemporary art: a universal exhaustion through over-work (on the part of the artist/art worker) and over-stimulation (the audience); the structural weakness of contemporary art as a set of institutional activities; and the instrumentalization of art. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, contemporary art, gender studies, Slavic studies, politics, and post-conflict studies.

Jonathan Blackwood is Associate Professor in Contemporary Art at Gray's School of Art, Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, Scotland. He is active as a curator and writer and has been working for nearly twenty years in the former Yugoslav space, focusing on cultural ecologies and intersections between the practices of contemporary art and radical politics. Jasmina Tumbas is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History and Performance Studies in the Department of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies, the University at Buffalo, USA. Her research focuses on queer and feminist interventions, diasporic resistance, and migration in contemporary art. She is the author of "I Am Jugoslovenka!" Feminist Performance Politics During and After Yugoslav Socialism.

1. Introduction: Yugoslav Hauntologies 2. Miraz/Dowry: On the Dialectics of Loss 3. Overcoming Art 4. Yugoslav Venation: Skeletal Traces of the Past in the Practice of the Present 5. Counter-cartographies of Post-Yugoslav Art 6. Ecstatic Bodies: An Archive of Queer Performative Bodies in North Macedonia 7. Living in the Post 8. Yugoslav Anti-colonial Endeavors in Art and Culture: Particular Cases of the Previous Century 9. Resonating Silence: Curating the Yugoslav Narrative in Recent X-ennials 10. Blackness beyond the Euro-American Lens as Exhibited and Documented in the 2000s at the Museum of African Art in Belgrade, Serbia 11. Practice against Systematic Errors: Cultural Institutions in Bosnia and Herzegovina and a Case Study of the KRAK Center 12. The Common Language of the Yugoslav Cultural Space 13. Archival Encounters: On Reconfiguring Art Historical Discourses 14. Yugoslav People's Art 15. (Re)Animating the Commons: Repoliticizing Environmental Violence through Counter-Narrating in Art-Activist Practices in Bosnia and Herzegovina 16. The Return of the Class Struggle or From Socialist Self-Management to Neoliberal Self-Exploitation 17. The Yugoslavia of the Mind: Diasporic Practices