Women and Partisan Art

We cordially invite you to a discussion with the editors of the edited volume titled Women and Partisan Art, subtitled “Aesthetics and Practices of Resistance in Yugoslavia and Carinthia,” published last year to mark the 80th anniversary of the victory over Nazism and Fascism in Europe.

The volume was edited by researcher, writer, and curator Elena Messner from the University of Vienna, Slavicist Cristina Beretta and Goran Lazičić from the University of Klagenfurt, and historian, English scholar, and activist Markus Gönitzer, president of the Peršman Society.

Participants in the discussion:

Elena Messner

Cristina Beretta

Goran Lazičić

Markus Gönitzer

and

Ana Hofman and Katja Kobolt from the Institute for Cultural and Memory Studies at ZRC SAZU as moderators

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More than thirty researchers from the former Yugoslavia and Western Europe, with their contributions to the edited volume “Women and Partisan Art,” shed light on the resistance of women partisans in Yugoslavia and Austrian Carinthia through their artistic practice and cultural engagement. They focus both on the context of the National Liberation Struggle and on subsequent practices, including modes of memory and re-actualization in contemporary art forms. The art of women partisans was and remains a form of resistance and a culturally subversive practice, ranging from avant-garde aesthetics, through folk art and handicrafts, to contemporary artistic expressions. The cultural production of Yugoslav and Carinthian women partisans and subsequent work on them encompasses literature, visual arts, film, photography, comics, textiles, print, theater, dance, and memorial architecture.

In conversation with the editors of the edited volume, which is based on papers presented at the international conference “Aesthetics of Resistance. Partisan Art and Feminist Partisan Cultural Practice” (Klagenfurt, 2023), and includes reflections on the traveling exhibition “Partizan★ke Art”—on view until the end of November at the Documentation Archive of the Austrian Resistance (Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischen Widerstandes) in Vienna—we will shed light on overlooked aspects of the past, address the challenges of their intersections in the present, and explore the productive potential of their memory for the future.

The discussion will be held in English. Admission to the discussion is free. You are cordially invited!

The presentation of the edited volume is part of the project Picturing Modernist Future: Women Illustrators and Childhood Conceptions in Socialist Yugoslavia (follow up), made possible by the Recovery and Resilience Plan and funded by the European Union – NextGenerationEU (MN-0010-618).