Women and Partisan Art

We cordially invite you to a discussion with the editors of the edited volume “Women and Partisan Art »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. 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.

The edited volume is based on the papers presented at the international conference “Aesthetics of Resistance. Partisan Art and Feminist Partisan Cultural Practice” (Klagenfurt, 2023), and includes reflections on the xhibition “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 brings together Elena Messner, Cristina Beretta, Goran Lazičić and Markus Gönitzer. and it will be moderated by Ana Hofman and Katja Kobolt from the Institute of Culture and Memory Studies at ZRC SAZU.

The discussion will be held in English.

The presentation of the edited volume is part of the project Picturing Modernist Futures: Women Illustrators and Conceptions of Childhood in Socialist Yugoslavia (follow-up), supported by the Recovery and Resilience Plan and funded by the European Union – NextGenerationEU (MN-0010-618), as well as the research programme Historical Interpretations of the 20th Century (P6-0347).