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Please join the upcoming Slavic Colloquium talk with guest visitor Bojana Videkanić (University of Waterloo, Canada).

Naïve Art, People’s Art, Partisan Art: Engaged Artistic Practices in Yugoslavia Between 1918 and 1980

In establishing a link between a few chosen examples of Yugoslav literature and visual art, especially Naïve art and realist and partisan art, Videkanić proposes to re-think the relationship between modernism's claim to autonomy and the demands of revolutionary socialist politics. Contrary to established analyses of naïve art as a form of primitive, unspoiled expression, (representing modernism's unconscious), and of partisan art as crude and didactic, she posits that these forms of art point to modernism's hybridity as it developed across the uneven political, social and economic terrain of the 20th century. More precisely, examples she brings up in her analysis reveal various tensions (formal, conceptual, political and infrastructural) between the core and the periphery of global modernism.

Bojana Videkanić is an associate professor of art history and visual culture at the University of Waterloo, ON Canada. Her book Nonaligned Modernism: Socialist Postcolonial Aesthetics in Yugoslavia, 1945-1985 was published by McGill-Queens University Press in 2020.  Videkanić’s art historical research focuses on 20th century socialist art in Yugoslavia and its contributions to the rise of global modernisms, socialist art, and anti-imperialist cultural networks between the Second and Third Worlds. Currently, she is working on comparative study between Yugoslav Naïve and partisan art and anti-imperialist and Marxist art as it developed outside the West.