Book Launch: Bojana Videkanic's Nonaligned Modernism: Socialist Postcolonial Aesthetics in Yugoslavia, 1945-1985

Tue Feb 2 09:26:49 EST 2021

The University of Waterloo’s Department of Fine Arts<https://uwaterloo.ca/fine-arts/> in association with McGill-University Press invites you to a Book Launch:
Bojana Videkanic Nonaligned Modernism: Socialist Postcolonial Aesthetic in Yugoslavia, 1945-1985
(McGill-Queens University Press, 2020)
When: Friday February 5, 2021 at 6:30pm (EST)
Where: ONLINE  via Webex, please register at: https://uwaterloo.webex.com/uwaterloo/onstage/g.php?MTID=ea5ed806cc20d6e2b4d833c615c0e0c78

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Speaker: Bojana Videkanic, Associate Professor Department of Fine Arts University of Waterloo
Chair: Joan Coutu<https://uwaterloo.ca/fine-arts/about/people/faculty/joan-coutu>, Professor Department of Fine Arts University of Waterloo
Discussants: Tamara Vukov<https://recherche.umontreal.ca/nos-chercheurs/repertoire-des-professeurs/chercheur/is/in19284/>, Associate Professor Department of Communication Université de Montréal
         Katja Praznik<http://www.buffalo.edu/cas/arts_management/who-we-are/praznik.html>, Associate Professor Arts Management Program, SUNY Buffalo

About the book:
In less than half a century, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia successfully defeated Fascist occupation, fended off dominating pressures from the Eastern and Western blocs, built a modern society on the ashes of war, created its own form of socialism, and led the formation of the Nonaligned Movement. This country's principles and its continued battles, fought against all odds, provided the basis for dynamic and exceptional forms of art.

Drawing on archival materials, postcolonial theory, and Eastern European socialist studies, Nonaligned Modernism chronicles the emergence of late modernist artistic practices in Yugoslavia from the end of the Second World War to the mid-1980s. Situating Yugoslav modernism within postcolonial artistic movements of the twentieth century, Bojana Videkanic explores how cultural workers collaborated with others from the Global South to create alternative artistic and cultural networks that countered Western hegemony. Videkanic focuses primarily on art exhibitions along with examples of international cultural exchange to demonstrate that nonaligned art wove together politics and aesthetics, and indigenous, Western, and global influences.

An interdisciplinary book, Nonaligned Modernism highlights Yugoslavia's key role in the creation of a global modernist ethos and international postcolonial culture.

Participants Bios:

[A picture containing person, posing  Description automatically generated]Joan Coutu is Professor of Art History and Visual Culture at the University Waterloo. Her research areas are the built environment of 18th-century Britain and early 20th-century Canada, with a focus on aesthetics and memory in space, politics, time, and social differentiation. Coutu has published two books, Persuasion and Propaganda: Monuments and the Eighteenth-century British Empire (2006) and Then and Now: Collecting and Classicism in Eighteenth-century England (2015), and has authored several essays on monuments, landscape design, and collecting. She is especially intrigued by the states of ‘emerging’ and ‘in-between.’

[A person taking a selfie  Description automatically generated with medium confidence]Tamara Vukov is a researcher, filmmaker/media artist, educator and writer based in Montréal / Tiohtiá:ke / Mooniyang. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the Université de Montréal, where she teaches courses in political communication and research-creation. Her research is anchored in critical approaches to political communication, engaged media and art, with a focus on mobilities, borders, social movements, and the contestation of social exclusions (including in the domains of migration, sexuality, labour, public health, housing justice, and Yugoslav regional legacies). Her work draws on media studies, social and political theory, engaged and participatory research, and research creation (particularly documentary and experimental media). She has published in such venues as the International Journal of Cultural Studies, Canadian Journal of Communication, Transfers Journal of Mobility Studies, Topia, Public, Social Semiotics, and such exhibition catalogues/essay collections as Le Soulèvement Infini (Infinite Uprising, eds. Didi-Huberman et Déry). Her films and videos have been presented internationally in over 15 countries. The trajectory of her work has developed out of long-term engagement in social movement and independent media arts spaces over the past several decades.

[cid:image014.png at 01D6F945.877B1B20]Katja Praznik is Associate Professor in University at Buffalo’s Arts Management Program/Department of Media Study. She holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Ljubljana. She teaches courses related to the political economy of the arts, cultural policy, and research in the field of arts management. She is the author of The Paradox of Unpaid Artistic Labor: Autonomy of Art, the Avant-Garde and Cultural Policy in the Transition to Post-Socialism (Ljubljana: Sophia, 2016) and Art Work: Invisible Labor and the Legacy of Yugoslav Socialism (forthcoming with University of Toronto Press).  Her research focuses on labor issues in the arts during the demise of the welfare-state regimes, and has been published in various peer-reviewed journals, such as Social Text, Historical Materialism, Journal for the Critique of Science (ČKZ), and KPY Cultural Policy Yearbook as well as in edited volumes, among them in NSK From Kapital to Capital (MIT Press 2015), and Crisis and New Beginnings: Art in Slovenia 2005–2015 (Moderna galerija 2015). Before moving to the United States, she worked as a freelancer in the Slovenian independent art scene. She was the editor-in-chief of a performing arts journal Maska and was engaged in the struggles for improving working conditions of art workers at Društvo Asociacija.

[cid:image015.png at 01D6F945.877B1B20]Bojana Videkanic is an Associate Professor of contemporary art and visual culture in the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Waterloo. Her research focuses on the 20th-century socialist art in Yugoslavia and its contributions to the rise of global modernisms through Yugoslavia’s participation in the Non-Aligned Movement and various de-colonial cultural practices. Videkanic has also written about contemporary artists from Canada (Lori Blondeau, Kinga Araya, Vessna Perunovich, Camille Turner, Terrance Houle), and about artists coming from the Yugoslav region, most recently about Tanja Ostojic’s seven-year long project Lexicon of Tanjas Ostojic. Her new research project deals with politically engaged Yugoslav art from the 20th century such as partisan art and Naïve art, and its relationships to similar art practices in Mexico, Egypt, Nigeria and other parts of the world.

For more information on the launch, or on how to log on the Webex platform please send your questions to: Sharon Dahmer  Sharon.dahmer at uwaterloo.ca<mailto:Sharon.dahmer at uwaterloo.ca>

This event is sponsored by the Department of Fine Arts, Faculty of Arts at University of Waterloo, and in association with the McGill-Queens University Press.

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