Shaping Revolutionary Memory: On the Trouble with Monuments in Socialist Yugoslavia and Beyond

Name: Shaping Revolutionary Memory: On the Trouble with Monuments in Socialist Yugoslavia and Beyond
Start: 2025-01-18T16:00:00+01:00
Location: Haus der Kulturen der Welt

Schedule

Sat, 18 Jan, 2025 at 04:00 pm

UTC+01:00

Location

Haus der Kulturen der Welt | Berlin, BE

A discussion around the book "Shaping Revolutionary Memory: The Production of Monuments in Socialist Yugoslavia" with Sanja Horvatinčić and Beti Žerovc, moderated by Nanne Buurman in Berlin.
Date: Saturday, 18 January 2025, at 16:00
Venue: HKW | Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin
The event will be held in English.
Sanja Horvatinčić and Beti Žerovc are the editors and two of the authors of the book Shaping Revolutionary Memory: The Production of Monuments in Socialist Yugoslavia, a comprehensive study of monuments commemorating Yugoslavia’s antifascist People's Liberation Struggle during the Second World War and socialist revolution, erected in the period 1945 to 1991. Since the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, these monuments have been subject to various fates, from neglect, vandalism, and destruction to the global fame generated by the high-modernist visual appeal of many of them.
In its in-depth interdisciplinary approach, the book embraces the wide-ranging diversity and complex context of Yugoslav monument making, including its inherent contradictions. Moving beyond purely aesthetic considerations and aware of the elusiveness of the messages originally inscribed in these works, it also examines the various modalities in which monuments in general operate as a medium.
A year after publication, Horvatinčić and Žerovc join in conversation with Nanne Buurman to reflect on their book project and discuss some of the broader questions about the past and future of monuments (and public art) which are suggested by the Yugoslav case. The discussion will also touch on the challenges involved in researching such politically charged topics, the most important lessons they learned in the process of making the book, and questions they would have liked to address but were unable to do so.
More about the book: https://igorzabel.org/en/publications/Shaping-Revolutionary-Memory-2023
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Nanne Buurman is a Research Associate at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich. Her research and publications focus on the politics, economies and epistemologies of curating, the past and present of documenta, the transcultural conditions of cultural production in a global context as well as the political ambivalences of modernity and their hauntings in today’s historiographic, curatorial, and artistic cultures of (dis)remembrance. She co-edited documenta: Curating the History of the Present (2017), Situating Global Art (2018), Networks of Care: Politics of Preserving and Discarding (2022). She is co-editor of the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art Biennales.
Sanja Horvatinčić is a Research Associate at the Institute of Art History in Zagreb, where she is currently, among others, part of the project NAM Globe_EXCHANGE: Models and Practices of Global Cultural Exchange and Non-aligned Movement. 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.
Beti Žerovc is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Arts at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. Her areas of research are visual art and the art system since the mid-nineteenth century, with a focus on their roles in society. She is the author of several books, including When Attitudes Become the Norm: The Contemporary Curator and Institutional Art (2015, reprinted in 2018) and co-editor of the On the Brink: The Visual Arts in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (1929–1941) (2019).
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The book is published by the Igor Zabel Association for Culture and Theory (Ljubljana) and Archive Books (Berlin).
The event is organized by the Archive Books and Igor Zabel Association.
Supported by: ERSTE Foundation, HKW, and by the research project of the Institute of Art History in Zagreb "Digital network, spatial and (con)textual analysis of artistic phenomena and heritage of the 20th century (DIGitART, 2023–2027)" funded by the European Union – NextGenerationEU.