The Research Center for the History of Transformations (RECET) at the University of Vienna and the Research Platform "Transformations and Eastern Europe" invite to their regular Transformative Salon on 7 March 2024 at 7 PM, this time with Dr. Sanja Horvatinčić (Institute of Art History, Zagreb) and Dr. Beti Žerovc (University of Ljubljana) moderated by Dr. Jelena Đureinović (RECET).
Venue: Café Merkur, Florianigasse 18, 1080 Wien
In socialist Yugoslavia, there was a vast production of monuments dedicated to the antifascist People’s Liberation Struggle in the Second World War and the socialist revolution. Since the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, these monuments have been subject to various fates, from neglect and physical destruction to global fame generated by the high-modernist visual appeal of a number of them. But the full scope, wide-ranging diversity, and complex context of Yugoslav monument-making, including its various contradictions, have remained largely unexplored. The book Shaping Revolutionary Memory: The Production of Monuments in Socialist Yugoslavia, recently published by the Igor Zabel Association for Culture and Theory (Ljubljana) and Archive Books (Berlin), represents a comprehensive overview of war memorials in Yugoslavia. With book editors Sanja Horvatinčić and Beti Žerovc, we are discussing this thorough and interdisciplinary exploration of the phenomenon of monuments, which offers a rich visual material to examine the key characteristics and specificities: What memorial practices and commemorative traditions preceded the development of monument-making in socialism? Who commissioned these monuments and how did Yugoslav cultural and memory politics influence their production? Who were their authors and what defined their formal and typological features? How was Yugoslav monument production related to comparative efforts abroad? What commemorative practices developed around monuments? How is this legacy evaluated and received today, both in the post-Yugoslav successor states and internationally?
Sanja Horvatinčić is a Research Associate at the Institute of Art History in Zagreb, Croatia. Her research focuses on the production of monuments and remembrance culture in socialist Yugoslavia, as well as on heritage and memory politics in the post-socialist context. She is currently a researcher at the project “Globe_EXCHANGE. Models and Practices of Global Cultural Exchange and Non-Aligned Movement”, and the coordinator of the project “Heritage from Below | Drežnica: Traces and Memories 1941-1945”. Along with Beti Žerovc, she is the co-author of the book Shaping Revolutionary Memory: The Production of Monuments in Socialist Yugoslavia (2023, Igor Zabel Association, Ljubljana, and Archive Books, Berlin).
Beti Žerovc is a Slovene art historian and art theorist. She teaches at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana. Her areas of research are visual art and the art system since the mid-nineteenth century, with a focus on their role in society. Žerovc co-edited exhibition catalogues The Lives of Monuments: World War II and public monuments in Slovenia (2018, Moderna galerija, Ljubljana) and On the Brink: The Visual Arts in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (1929–1941) (2019, Moderna galerija, Ljubljana). Her last book When Attitudes Become the Norm: The Contemporary Curator and Institutional Art was published in 2015 and reprinted in 2018 (Igor Zabel Association, Ljubljana, and Archive Books, Berlin). Along with Sanja Horvatinčić, she is the co-author of the book Shaping Revolutionary Memory: The Production of Monuments in Socialist Yugoslavia, (2023, Igor Zabel Association, Ljubljana, and Archive Books, Berlin).
Jelena Đureinović is a historian interested in cultures and politics of war memory based at the Research Centre for the History of Transformations at the University of Vienna. Her current research project, funded through the APART-GSK program of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, investigates the role of the memory and legacies of war in the relations between the Yugoslav Partisan veterans and anti-colonial liberation movements from Africa. Her first book The Politics of Memory of the Second World War in Contemporary Serbia: Collaboration, Resistance and Retribution was published with Routledge in 2020.
FREE ENTRY. No registration is needed to participate. The event language is English.
The organisers will record the event and publish the recording on the RECET YouTube channel 2-3 days later.
