Workshop accompanying the exhibition “Continuities and Interruptions”, “A Contemporary Perspective on the Legacy of Postwar Modernism in Yugoslavia”

Continuities and Interruptions exhibition, with which the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rijeka marks the seventieth anniversary of the first Salon held in Rijeka, belongs to the category of “memory exhibitions.” These exhibitions explore the contributions or roles of individual or periodic art events in articulating and affirming specific artistic and curatorial practices, as well as their emotional imprints on the collective memory of the communities they are connected to. The exceptionally positive reception of such exhibition projects reflects the interest of professionals, academics, and the general public in the role that exhibitions play in forming collective and individual identities. Recently, influenced by global academic discussions on the political, economic, and intellectual aspects of decolonization processes, interest has also grown in their role within the cultural exchange practices of the Global North and South. The organization of “memory exhibitions” is often motivated by the desire of museums and galleries to recreate or replicate for contemporary audiences art events recorded in art history as turning points, i.e. as moments of antithetical responses to the status quo in a particular art scene during a specific historical moment. Retrospectively, such historical moment is seen as critical for the scene’s internal, poetic, and theoretical reconfiguration and its opening to new stylistic and performative paradigms.

From the perspective of the Yugoslav art scene in the early 1950s, the launching of the Salon in 1954 as a periodic, biennial exhibition of contemporary Yugoslav art marked a significant departure from prior exhibition practices. The fact that the Salon’s first edition offered an entirely new and – in relation to the stylistic, formal, and poetic structure of the then-mainstream – disruptive version of contemporary art production contributed to its historicization as a radical turning point in the understanding of modernity within Yugoslav modern art. However, the exhibition Continuities and Interruptions reconceptualized this depiction of Salon ’54 as the foundational moment in the canonization of postwar Yugoslav art’s high modernism, supplementing its partial reconstruction with a selection of works shown in its subsequent four editions (1956, 1959, 1961, 1963), which vividly illustrate the process of its articulation. Such a conception actualized the issues regarding the relationships between national art scenes within the unified Yugoslav artistic space, the strategies for its cultural and historical reconfiguration in the narratives of new national histories of postwar modernism, and its positioning within the post-transition “integral” narrative of European modern art. It also raised the question of how to present the artistic culture of socialism under contemporary conditions of fragmentation and the erosion of younger audiences’ knowledge about the cultural, social, and political assumptions behind the relationship between modern art and the socialist state.

Based on insights into the central segment of the art culture of the 1950s and early 1960s, offered by the Continuities and Interruptions, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, in collaboration with the Zagreb Institute of Art History, will host a one-day workshop in Rijeka on December 19, which will address the above mentioned issues, the consequences of integrating the socialist-era Yugoslav art into the Central and Eastern European cultural space through the approximation of historical socialist experiences, and the challenges of such recontextualization. This discussion follows the ongoing efforts to conceptualize the contributions of former socialist Europe to decolonization processes in terms of internationalism and solidarity, which, contrary to the ideas underlying the aforementioned integration, emphasize the specificity of Yugoslavia’s cultural and political policy of non-alignment as a basis for its exclusion from these processes. Finally, the workshop will consider the conditions, motives, and methods for the “use” of the modernist heritage, including the art legacy of the Non-Aligned Movement within contemporary art.

The workshop consists of two parts: the first part will bring together the voices of curators and researchers to examine specific examples of research and contextualization of art materials and phenomena, from the perspectives of institutions, exhibitions and programs, while the second part will focus on presenting examples from artists’ practices.

Participants of the workshop:
Ljiljana Kolešnik (Senior Research Fellow with Permanent Tenure, IPU, Zagreb), Ana Dević (Curator, WHW, Zagreb), Mira Gaćina (MSU Skopje, online), Tevž Logar (Curator, Rijeka/Ljubljana), Vesna Meštrić (Director, MSU Zagreb), Marko Tadić (Artist, Zagreb), Jelena Vesić (Independent Researcher and Curator, Belgrade), Natalija Vujošević (Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art of Montenegro, Podgorica), Beti Žerovc (Associate Professor, Faculty of Arts, Ljubljana), and the curatorial team of the exhibition Continuities and Disruptions: Kristina Barišić, Branka Benčić, Ksenija Orelj, and Diana Zrilić (MMSU Rijeka).

BIOGRAPHIES OF PARTICIPANTS

PROGRAM:

09:30 – 09:45
Brief introduction to the workshop, Branka Benčić, Director of the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Rijeka

09:45 – 12:15
Presentations by workshop participants

12:15 – 12:30
Coffee break

12:30 – 14:00
Moderated discussion among workshop participants

14:00 – 15:30
Lunch break

15:30 – 16:30
Conversation with artists Marko Tadić and Tevž Logar

16:30 – 17:00
Final discussion

The program is co-organized by the Institute of Art History and MMSU Rijeka.

The workshop is part of the Zero Hour program.

Support: City of Rijeka, Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia, HAVC

Photo: Ivor Mažar