Ana Ereš: Exhibiting Yugoslav Art at the Venice Biennale (1948–1990)

26.04.2021

When: Monday, 26 April 2021, 16:30

Online lecture

Ana Ereš: Exhibiting Yugoslav Art at the Venice Biennale (1948–1990): A History of Shifting Representations

The topic of the lecture is the participation of Yugoslavia at the Venice Biennale between 1948 and 1990. The exhibitions held in the Yugoslav Pavilion in Venice reveal a history of complex relations between the official state politics and art institutions that not only defined the framework of Yugoslav art representations abroad, but also influenced the dynamics of development and relations within the art system in the country. 

The lecture offers an overview of Yugoslav participation at the Venice Biennale while focusing on the transformations of dominant representational models of Yugoslav art that were achieved and presented through these exhibitions. The investigation of this specific history of exhibitions reveals the international orientation of the state cultural policy as well as the internal administrative and institutional policies that had a significant influence on the physiognomy of shows exhibited at the Yugoslav Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Special consideration is given to the way in which the Yugoslav exhibitions in Venice reflected some of the fundamental issues of artistic life within Yugoslavia during the given period, such as the question of semantics of modernism in post-war Yugoslavia and the understanding of new art practices during the 1970s and 1980s.   


The lecture is held in English and is part of the seminar Art Exhibiting in Slovenia, from the Early 19th Century to Today, organized by: Department of Art History of the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana and Igor Zabel Association; supported by: ERSTE Foundation.

The conversation with Ana Ereš is moderated by Beti Žerovc, head of the seminar Art for Collective Use, Department of Art History of the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana.

Exhibition in the Yugoslav Pavilion at the XXVII International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia (1956), Documentation of Aleksa Čelebonović, photo courtesy of Vladan and Jelena Čelebonović.
Exhibition in the Yugoslav Pavilion at the XXVII International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia (1956), Documentation of Aleksa Čelebonović, photo courtesy of Vladan and Jelena Čelebonović.

About the lecturer

Ana Ereš is an art historian and research associate at the Department for Art History at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade. Her research interests include exhibition history, modernism, and history of the Yugoslav art space. She has published the following monographs: Mrdjan Bajić: Sculptotecture (2013), Sculpture: Medium, Method,
Social Practice
(2016, co-editor) and Marko Čelebonović (2017; 2018, co-author), for which she was given the Lazar Trifunović Award for art criticism. She won the Pavle Vasić Award for her book Yugoslavia at the Venice Biennale (1938–1990): Cultural Policies and Politics of Exhibitions (2020).