The (post)Yugoslav Art Practices: Curating Difficult Knowledge

Tracing the relation between contemporary art, (post)Yugoslav space and feminist epistemology, this lecture will question ways of historicising, situating and institutionalising the knowledge that this relation triggers. It will also make an epistemological turn towards counter-historical situating of recent art-theory knowledge within this still undefined and complex geopolitical zone. Today, this zone functions as a zone of discomfort where theoretical, artistic, activist, as well as curatorial practices occur and produce both: dislocation and new locations, enabling the politicisation of time and space. Furthermore, it is a zone of subjugated and undomesticated knowledge that interrupts multiplied art histories with a counter-historical emergency of facing the present that shifts in-between unspoken history and utopian/dystopian future. Reverting the false universalism of singularly authorised art canon(s) into a feminist episteme of uni -categorisation beyond sex and gender, this introduction to (post)Yugoslav art practices will be presented through recent art works dealing with an (im)possibility of shaping a geopolitical or a historical frames of art today, especially when it comes to the politics of belonging and ways of its construction.

Jelena Petrović is a feminist scholar, cultural theorist and art-worker. (Co)author of many articles, event and cross-disciplinary projects related to post/Yugoslav issues—particularly to mis/interpretative models of (post)Yugoslav history, memory, culture, art-theory and feminism, working on new epistemological models of knowledge production. She is co-founder and member of a feminist curatorial group Red Min(e)d dealing with the relation of contemporary art and feminism in the post-Yugoslav space. Jelena Petrović is teaching about feminist curating and contemporary art practices at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, University of Ljubljana (since 2014). From this academic year, she is appointed as an endowed professor for Central and South Eastern European Art Histories at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.