Picturing Modernist Future: Women Illustrators and Childhood Conceptions in Socialist Yugoslavia

1)      Wednesday, 9.2. 2022, 14h-15.30h

ZRC SAZU, Novi Trg 2, 1000 Ljubljana and online, Slovenia

Introductory presentation of a research project

Picturing Modernist Future: Women Illustrators and Childhood Conceptions in Socialist Yugoslavia

Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow Katja Kobolt at the Institute of Culture and Memory Studies presented her comparative interdisciplinary research on women illustrators and childhood conceptions in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY, 1945-1991). By considering all former Yugoslav contexts in the action, she combines art and literary history and theory with cultural studies to gain new critical insights into socialist aesthetic education and subjectivation of children, especially in relation to gender.

 

2)      Tuesday, 24.5.2022, 10h-12h

Academy of Fine Arts Vienna - Anatomy Hall, Schillerplatz 3, 1010 Vienna, Austria

Guest lecture as part of the Spring Curatorial Programme Art Geographies

No One Belongs Here More Than You: The Ongoing Struggle OF(F)/ON the Island of Feminist Curating

Drawing on research into women's authorship in socialist Yugoslavia, particularly in the field of publishing for children, researcher and curator Katja Kobolt proposes to look at the urgencies of feminist curating today through the historical lens of art's relational position in the project called modernity. Kobolt has studied feminist curating and canonization and worked in various feminist and post-migrant initiatives in the area historically called "Central Europe" and later divided into "West" and "Southeast" Europe.

In the presentation, Kobolt starts from the central feature of modernity, which, especially with revolutions and through processes of democratisation, raised anew the question of the public and thus opened public spaces for the new kind of public: the masses. Consequently, art, like other social spheres of (re)production of representation, was (again) inevitably linked to questions of power and governance. Kobolt refers in particular to the question of art's relation to other areas of (re)production of representation as articulated in the 20th century left movement: the debates about the avant-gardes and the so-called l'art pour l'art versus Zhdanov-type socialist realism. With particular reference to the "regional" or Yugoslavian version of these debates known as the "Conflict of the Artistic Left," Kobolt will reconsider feminist curating in relation to the autonomy of art. By repeating the questions raised in the historical "Conflict of the Artistic Left" in a feminist context, the focus shifts to the production agency, the producers, or the question of relations in production and authorship.

 

3)      Wednesday, 25.5.2022, 13.15h-14.45h.

Guest lecture in the series Gender and Politics at the Centre for Southeast European Studies, University of Graz, Hörsaal, Schubertstr. 21, Graz, Austria

Production site Yugoslav socialist publishing for children

In post-war socialist Yugoslavia, with its consistent promotion of literacy, education, and aesthetic education, publishing for children (in the broader sense, i.e., illustrated fictional literature, magazines, and educational texts) experienced unprecedented expansion. The sector attracted (especially in some parts of socialist Yugoslavia, particularly Slovenia, but to some extent in other Yugoslav republics as well) academically trained women professionals and artists who contributed thematically, formally, and aesthetically daring original productions for minors.

Based on a broader study of Yugoslav socialist publishing for minors, my presentation focuses on the production of the early postwar years and examines it in terms of a notion of impact (currently revived in research and cultural policy).

 

4)      Friday, 17.6.2022

ZRC SAZU, Novi trg 2, 1000 Ljubljana (and online)

Project proposal writing workshop for Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions – Postdoctoral Fellowships

With the new call for Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions – Postdoctoral Fellowships (MSCA PF), ZRC SAZU is organizing a workshop to support applicants with proposal preparation. The workshop is open to researchers from ZRC SAZU interested in applying for MSCA PF abroad, as well as to researchers from abroad interested in applying for a research placement at ZRC SAZU.

A group of ZRC SAZU researchers (Dr Rok Benčin from the Institute of Philosophy, official evaluator of MSCA applications, and Dr Ksenija Bogetić Pejović and Dr Katja Kobolt, Marie Skłodowska-Curie researchers from the Institute of Culture and Memory Studies) will offer individualized support with project proposal writing to interested participants. At the practical workshop, Dr Benčin, dr Bogetić Pejović and dr Kobolt will present their own experience with MSCA applications, from the perspectives of applicants and evaluators, and will jointly give feedback to participants’ proposals.

The workshop will take place in Slovenian and English, in person at ZRC SAZU. In case of interest, the hybrid option (in-person & zoom) will be made available.

 

5) Tuesday, 21th June 2022 at 11h

Institute of Culture and Memory Studies ZRC SAZU invites

Guest lecture by art historian and artist

Bojana Videkanić (University of Waterloo)

Politically engaged art, realism, people's art and the politics of liberation

In the presentation art historian and artist Bojana Videkanić considers the question of realism in the 20th century Yugoslav art and in the context of building state socialism. More precisely, she focuses on engaged art done by self-taught artists and artists who were politically engaged considering the ways in which their art was made possible by the state socialist cultural infrastructure which included investments in building institutions, organizations, and opportunities for development of broad cultural engagement among workers, peasants, and non-academically trained artists.

Bojana Videkanić is an associate professor of contemporary art and visual culture at the University of Waterloo, Canada. Her research focuses on twentieth-century socialist art in Yugoslavia and its contributions to the rise of global modernisms through Yugoslavia’s participation in the Non-Aligned Movement and various decolonial cultural practices. Her book Nonaligned Modernism: Socialist Postcolonial Practices in Yugoslavia, 1945–1985 was published by McGill-Queens University Press.

 

6)  Wednesday, 17. 8. 2022

Guest lecture at the Summer School as School by Stacion – Center for Contemporary Art Prishtina, The Boxing Club, Rr/st. Mark Isaku 8, 10000 Prishtinë, Republika e Kosovës

What is feminist in research and art?

When one says “feminism” the emancipatory political dimension seems obvious. However, how does it stand with feminism in the contemporary condition of liberal proliferation of feminism into feminisms? In the last three to two post-socialist decades so-called feminist art but also research production was deterritorialized or rather reterritorialized by the globalized systems which have been (like all spheres of life) deeply immersed in the internalized modes of capitalist production and also in variously exercised identity violence. Thus, the simple question how to research and curate or how live and act in feminist terms has returned with renewed urgency.

https://stacion.org/en/Public-Program2022

 

7) Monday, 10.10.2022, 18h-20h

Participation in a round table discussion as part of the Sophia Symposium, organised by Sophia Publishing House, Edicija Jugoslavije in collaboration with Škuc Gallery, Stari trg 21, Ljubljana

On the political potential of utopia

Participants: dramaturge and publicist Ivana Momčilović from the international platform Edicija Yugoslavia, researchers from the Institute of Culture and Memory Studies ZRC SAZU Dr. Tanja Petrović, Dr. Ana Hofman and Dr. Katja Kobolt, and with a read contribution by literary theorist Dr. Biljana Andonovska from the Belgrade Institute of Literature and Art.

The starting point for the discussion was the book The Unpredictable Past of the Future: On the Political Potential of Utopia, published this fall by Edicija Jugoslavija in cooperation with Sophia Publishing House and Borec magazine in Serbo-Croatian and English. It was triggered by the recent discovery of Walk Through the Future, a novel about emancipatory education. It was written from the point of view of the character Mala Zora between 1924 and 1925 for the year 2024, practically our present. It was published as a sub-sheet of the newspaper Budućnost, a newsletter for the children of organised workers, edited by Dr. Dragutin Vladisavljević, the probable author of the novel. It is an extremely rare example of youth social utopian science fiction from the early 20th century with numerous illustrations. We presented and updated the emancipatory ideas of the novel, their contexts and messages, the work of the editor Vladisavljević, and considered the imaginative and emancipatory charge of art and utopia in the organisation of labour and the social imaginary in relation to today's social situation of the erasure of the historical memory of the common state of socialist Yugoslavia.

https://www.skuc.org/sophijin-simpozij-2/

 

8) Monday, 24.10.2022, 19h-20h

Participation in a round table within the festival of reading culture Prepišno redakništvo - Fiction is everything, Lud Literatura, Trubarjeva 51, Ljubljana

Writing has nothing to do with the storm

The awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature to the prima donna of French autobiographical writing, Annie Ernaux, confirmed the status of autofiction as a privileged medium of expression for the disadvantaged or cemented its reputation as a genre of literary reflection on the structural inequalities faced by women, the lower classes, newcomers, and other groups. The various aspects of autofiction were discussed by Dijana Matković, author of the self-reflective novel "Why I Do not Write," Katja Kobolt, a theorist who has a PhD on women's war writing and studies autofiction in the field of literature as well as in other artistic practices, and scholar Iva Kosmos, who also moderated the discussion.

 

https://www.ludliteratura.si/prepisno-urednistvo/

https://koridor-ku.si/literatura/na-prepihu-resnicnih-in-fiktivnih-glasov-o-jubilejnem-prepisnem-urednistvu/

 

9) Tuesday, 8.11.2022, 12h-14h

Guest lecture at the University of Waterloo, Faculty of Arts, 200 University Avenue West, Waterloo, ON, Canada N2L 3G1 and zoom

Art and (gendered) reproductive labour: the case of Yugoslav socialist women illustrators

What does the experience of the artistic work of women illustrators for children in socialist Yugoslavia tell us today in terms of the organisation of productive and reproductive work and the hierarchically considered division of artistic work into the so-called fine arts and applied arts on the one hand, and production for adults and children on the other? Why should we concern ourselves with this experience at all?

Starting from the question of the relationship between the specific organisation of productive and reproductive labour in relation to artistic labour and the materiality of artworks, in the lecture I dealt with gender politics and the organisation of labour in socialist Yugoslavia. Based on the interviews with the older generation of illustrators, editors, and authors who worked in the booming Yugoslav children's publishing sector, I outlined the conditions of production in the Yugoslav children's publishing sector. In particular, I asked about the relationship between productive and reproductive labour in relation to the artistic  and lives of women artists producing for children. How were work and life for women artists and authors? How did the relationship between their productive and their reproductive work effect the artworks they produced? Finally, and to justly complicate the whole picture, I introduced the question of class in relation to productive and reproductive labour and the artistic division of labour.

https://uwaterloo.ca/fine-arts/events/artist-talk-dr-katja-kobolt

 

10) Thursday, 10.11.2022, 15.15-17.00

Paper presentation at the 54th Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) Annual Convention, 17 East Monroe Street, Chicago , IL, 60603, US

2-11 Precarious Forms, Forms of Precarity - LaSalle 2, 7th Floor

Chair: Maša Kolanović, U of Zagreb (Croatia)

Disc.: Dijana Jelača, Brooklyn College

Papers:

Danijela Lugarić, U of Zagreb (Croatia)

"Notes towards 'Precarious' Terminology: What Do We Talk about When We Talk about the Post-Soviet?"

Tanja Petrović, Scientific Research Centre SAZU (Slovenia)

"Scarce Forms, Collective Imagination, and Precarity of Socialism: Rereading Socialism and its Demise through Forms"

Katja Kobolt, Scientific Research Centre SAZU (Slovenia)

"Encountering Precariousness: Postwar Yugoslav Socialist Publishing for Minors and Childhood Conceptions"

How did the children's publishing sector (re)establish itself in the socially, economically, and institutionally devastated/in-becoming revolutionary post-war situation? How was the generation of children who experienced persecution and violence, orphanage and flight, famine, armed resistance, PLA victory, and everyday realities during World War II addressed by the establishing print? In my work, I have sought answers to these questions by pursuing the concept of precarity in its semantic quality as an insecure existential state in two ways: First, as subordination to total control, authority (in the historical sense, especially state power), and alleged totalitarianism; and second, in relation to traumatic wartime and postwar experiences.

Both, the ways how the post-war socialist print for children was established as well as how it addressed children are evidence of inclusive strategies. Promoting an ethic of inclusion that involved everyone in the construction of the new society positioned children in the midst of revolutionary society and equipped them with agency

Thus, with regard to the study of Yugoslav socialist children's print and childhood, rather than the top-down approach typical of totalitarianism studies, a bottom-up approach, which takes into account the complex relationships between structural, material, and affective contexts, as well as historical objectifications, as embodied in the postwar children's print, promises not only to see the past in a more complicated light, but also to open it up to alternative imaginations of the future.

https://www.aseees.org/sites/default/files/downloads/2022%20Convention%20Program%20FINAL%20to%20post%20sm.pdf

 

11) Tuesday, 15.11.2022, 18h-20h

Round table presentation Social impact in art and culture: the multiple lives of a concept, ZRC SAZU, Novi trg 2, 1000 Ljubljana

A panel discussion on the occasion of the launch of the book Social Impact in Art and Culture: The Diverse Lives of a Concept. Nada Vodušek discussed the concept and practices with editors Ivo Kosmos and Martin Pogačar and chapter authors Lana Zdravković and Katja Kobolt, and tried to unravel what social impact in art means, how to achieve it and how to problematize it. During the discussion we also had a short artistic intervention. Social impact is a fashionable concept of the last decade. It is a concept that dominates the writing of artistic and scientific projects, as well as the thinking and talking about art and science. But what is this idea about: what kind of art and society and the relationship between them? What does this concept mean? The talk was organised by the Bunker Institute, the ZRC Publishing House and the Azil Bookshop, with the financial support of the Slovenian Book Agency.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T78QLgJZsUY

 

12) Tuesday, 24.11.2022, 14.30-16h

Roundtable in the EUTOPIA WEEK,  Faculty of Social Sciences, Kardeljeva ploščad 5, Room 7 and online

Migrations, reintegration and sustainable development in the post-Yugoslav context

The EUTOPIA consortium connects universities, organisational models, cultures, and countries, where people’s lives, careers, priorities, and expectations are very diverse. This round table explored EUTOPIA’s diversity as an opportunity for reflection, comparison, and mutual inspiration. What does it mean to strive for research excellence in the South-East-European and post-Yugoslav space, marked by significant political, economic, and sociocultural transformations over the past two centuries? How do local collective memories feed into imaginations of the future, and are these reflections on the past, present, and future of any broader, transnational significance? To discuss these and related questions, this round table, moderated by Asst. Prof. dr. Natalija Majsova, brought together four internationally distinguished scholars in the humanities and social sciences, all of whom have experience with different academic and cultural contexts. Drawing on their personal and professional experience, dr. Katja Kobolt, assoc. prof. dr. Tamara Pavasović Trošt, assoc. prof. dr. Aljoša Pužar, all based in Slovenia, and dr. Colin Rittberg, currently based in the Netherlands, reflected on academic buzzwords such as international mobility, interdisciplinarity, and sustainability, together sketching out their specificities in the South-East-European context. They not only provided insights into the logic of research project calls, but also unpacked the significance of post-Yugoslav collective memory and post-socialist infrastructures, outlining major research challenges, opportunities, and bottlenecks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VISwyXU4RgQ

 

13) Wednesday, 14.11.2022, 17h-19h

Project presentation within the MSCA chapter Slovenia

Katja Kobolt hosted the MSCA Slovenia Chapter initiative and presented her research within the MSCA project Picturing Modernist Future: Women Illustrators and Childhood Conceptions in Socialist Yugoslavia.

 

14) Wednesday, 29.3.2023, 10h-14h

Ministry of Higher Education, Science and Innovation, Great Hall, Masarykova 16, Ljubljana, Slovenia

Presentation of the research project

How to address "gender equality and inclusion" in the Horizon Europe project application

At an event where representatives of the European Commission and participants will introduce the cross-cutting theme of gender equality and gender mainstreaming in research and innovation will Dr Katja Kobolt address the question how to adequately integrate the gender dimension in research, using the example of the project Picturing Modernist Future: Women Illustrators and Childhood Conceptions in Socialist Yugoslavia.

https://www.gov.si/dogodki/2023-03-29-kako-nasloviti-enakost-spolov-in-vkljucevanje-dimenzije-spola-v-projektni-prijavi-programa-obzorje-evropa/

 

15) Monday, 3.4.2023, 18h-19.30h

Škuc Gallery, Stari trg 21, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia

Book presentation

Curating with care (Routledge 2023) with co-editor Dr Elke Krasny and chapter writers Dr Petja Grafenauer, Dr Brigita Miloš and Dr Katja Kobolt of The platform of care: Collective curatorial modes of the n*a*i*l*s hacks*facts*fictions platform.

https://www.galerijaskuc.si/si/dogodki/

 

16) Tuesday, 18.4.2003, 8.30h-10h

Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana, Kardeljeva ploščad 5, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia

Guest lecture

(Gendered) Artistic production for children and social reproduction

As a guest lecturer within the Sociology of Art and Culture course, Dr Katja Kobolt will present the results of her research on the production frameworks and conditions of artistic work for children within the Yugoslav socialist self-managed children's publishing industry. She will focus in particular on the neglected dimensions of the gendered artistic work, especially its structural, material and temporal aspects, and will interrogate the social construction of the value of children's artwork, taking into account the potentials of artistic practice as social reproduction.

 

17) Friday, 5.5.2023, 14h-16h

Guest lecture within the DAAD project "Im Osten viel Neues!", Seminar for Slavonic Studies, University of Halle an der Salle, Germany (zoom)

Artistic production for children in Yugoslav socialist self-managed publishing

On the ground of the professional writings and interviews with professionals working in the Yugoslav socialist publishing for children, in the guest lecture dr. Kobolt turned to discourses on the artistic value of production for children and the organisation of artistic work for children in Yugoslav socialist publishing, which were framing the feminisation of the artistic production for children and the social construction of its value.

 

18) Tuesday, 16.5.2023, 17h-19h

Czeck Academy of Sciences, Institute of the Czech Literature of the CAS, Forum in Literary Studies, Prague, Czech Republic

(Online) lecture

Postmigrant Aesthetics: Autofiction and the Resistance of Subjectivity

Dr. Katja Kobolt addressed discursivizing and representing of postmigrant experiences in autofictional writing by Dijana Matković (Ljubljana), particularly in her novel Zakaj ne pišem? and in autofictional visual representations in selected lens-based and installation artworks by Anna Ehrenstein (Tirana/Berlin). Following Erol Yildiz‘s (2018) suggestion, she on the one hand, traced the identity constraints that both artists describe in their works—from gendering, migrantization, and also racialization to classism. She also reflected on „technologies of subjectivity in the textual [and visual] fabric“ (Brinkler-Gabler, 1996: 401) as gestures of resistance.

https://ucl.cas.cz/en/aktuality/postmigrant-aesthetics/

 

19) Thursday, 25.5.2023, 14.45.–16.15

Symposium “From Margin to Autonomy in the Post-Yugoslav Context, UL-ALUO Tobačna, Tobačna ulica 5, Ljubljana, Slovenia

Presentation of a paper

Artistic production for children and arts autonomy

Drawing on a larger study on children’s books publishing in socialist Yugoslavia (1945–1991), Katja Kobolt raised questions about the autonomy of art and artistic production for children and/as (re)productive work at different levels: What is constitutive of the hegemonic binary distinction between fine and applied arts which is largely based on the assumption of the autonomy of art? Within this hierarchical distinction, the so-called applied arts, which include illustration in particular and also artistic production for children in general, are of lesser (abstract) value. This hierarchy, made clear by the term “minor arts”, is projected onto artistic activity for children: from production to reception and general valorization to historicization and canonization. Given that this distinction has obvious “gatekeeping” effects and, as feminist researchers of canon constitution, in particular, have shown, is obviously culturally translated by keeping certain social groups and their creativity out of the canon, considering how this distinction is constituted is of broader social relevance. Following on from discussions of value as articulated in the social reproduction theory, in this paper Kobolt operationalized the value relationship between productive and reproductive labor to understand the supposed “lower” value (both material and abstract) of artistic production for children.

 

20) Tuesday, 13.6.2023, 18h

Center of Illustration / Vodnik Homestead, Stritarjeva ulica 7, 1000 Ljubljana

Invited lecture

by Aleksandar Bošković (Columbia University, New York)

in the framework of the project Picturing Modernist Future: Women Illustrators and Childhood Conceptions in Socialist Yugoslavia

The Subversive Pedagogy of Belgrade Surrealism: Aleksandar Vučo and Dušan Matić's The Fine Feats of the "Five Cockerels" Gang

The 1933 collaborative surrealist book The Fine Feats of the "Five Cockerels" Gang marked the end of the historical avant-gardes in Yugoslavia. It was written by two prominent Belgrade Surrealists - Aleksandar Vučo, who wrote the verses, and Dušan Matić, who authored the preface and created the collages and the accompanying prose texts that "explain" them. The Fine Feats is one of the examples of avant-garde photopoetry books for children and a rare example of a surrealist "novel in verse" with photomontages.

The lecture introduces the lesser-known practices of the Belgrade Surrealists, explains their inclination towards the renewal of children's literature, focusing particularly on The Fine Feats, and discusses the aesthetic and ideological concepts that the Belgrade Surrealists developed and put at the service of the Revolution. Using these surrealist concepts - the wall, the marvelous, spacing/doubling, and the interval - the latent meanings and emancipatory potential of this socially significant pedagogical project are elaborated. Finally, the author takes a close look at some of Matić's collages and accompanying prose texts from the book and their subversive, "Aesopian" role within the symbolic economies of contemporary Yugoslav society. The lecture concludes with an account of the historical trajectory of the Belgrade Surrealist Circle and subsequent editions of The Fine Feats in socialist Yugoslavia.

The guest lecture is part of the public program announcing the 2024 exhibition Biba Buba Baja: Creating (for) socialist children, which presents the results of the research project Picturing Modernist Future: Women Illustrators and Childhood Conceptions in Socialist Yugoslavia by the Institute of Culture and Memory Studies of the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts in collaboration with the Center for Illustration and City of Women.

https://www.facebook.com/events/1475020756637568/?ref=newsfeed

 

21) Saturday, 30.9.2023, 9h-11.15

Paper presentation at the 6th International Scientific Meeting Socijalizam na klupi, organised by the Centre for Cultural and Post-Cultural Studies of Socijalizma, Sveučilište Jurja Dobrile, Pula, Croatia.

Children's publishing encountering Post-War and Post-Informbiro Precarity

In this paper I present the institutional forms of children's publishing in the post-war and post-Informbiro period and the representations of children in post-war publishing. I focused on the case of Mladinska knjiga in Ljubljana and presented its early post-war years in the context of the emerging Yugoslav socialist publishing, which was outlined through pre-war and partisan publishing. I also analyse the cultural, political and structural responses to children's publishing after the Informbiro crisis. In my analysis I have drawn on historical documents, testimonies, secondary literature and editorial policies, as well as on the representations of children's wartime and post-war experiences in the magazines Ciciban and Pionir. I evaluated the results using Judith Butler's (2004, 2009) dual concept of 'precarity' in its connotations as a precarious state and conditions for it.

https://www.unipu.hr/ckpis/socijalizam_na_klupi/2023

 

22) Saturday, 14.10.2023

Presentation at the International Conference "Art and child", in the framework of the Festival Vezeni most, 10.-14.10.2023, Faculty of Arts, University of Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina

The Yugoslav post-war socialist children's press: institutional forms and the trauma of war

How to address war in a time of more or less permanent wars? In this presentation I outline the ways in which post-war Yugoslav children's publishing was established, focusing on the question of post-war addressing of children's war and post-war experiences.

 

23) Wednesday, 18.10.2023, 16.20-19.00

Guest lecture in the framework of the research project Youth Music after 1945 and the Musical Youth of Slovenia, Department of Musicology, Faculty of Arts, University Ljubljana, Aškerčeva 2, Ljubljana, Slovenia

Yugoslav Studies: Who, what, how, why now and so what?

Drawing on a larger study of artistic work in Yugoslav socialist publishing for children (1945-91) Katja Kobolt will problematize the epistemological, methodological, material and thus also political aspects of the study of artistic work for children and aesthetic education of the time. How was the Yugoslav post-war children's publishing re-established, what were its changing organisational-structural forms and what were its cultural-political orientations? What were the conditions of artistic work for children, how was it valued? What are the specificities of artistic production for children and, above all, why is it meaningful to engage with all these questions today?

http://muzikologijaff.si/gmgm/novice/

 

24) Saturday, 28.10.2023, 11.-12.30

Presentation at the International Conference Aesthetics of resistance partisan art and feminist partisan cultural practice in Yugoslavia and Carinthia, October 27th - 28th, 2023, Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, Universitätsstraße 65-67, Klagenfurt/Celovec, Austria

Gendering (Yugoslav socialist) artistic production for children

Looking at the Yugoslav communist discourses and organising in the pre-war period, the Anti-Fascist Women's Front (1943-1953) within the People's Liberation Front (PLA, 1941-1945), the precarious post-II. World War situation characterised by the absence of public institutions of social reproductive work, and its subsequent institutional consolidation from the 1950s onward, the question of social care and protection of children runs like a thread along ‘women's question’ throughout the history of socialist Yugoslavia. (Burcar; Jeraj; Tomšič). In the Yugoslav self-managed socialism so-called children’s and women's questions continued to be at the centre of society's overall emancipation, especially from alienated work towards more self-determined work and relations in production and thus life, exactly through questioning and restructuring of the autonomous social spheres, especially the spheres of productive and reproductive labour, education but also of culture and art. Considering that one-third of the post-II. World War Yugoslav population was younger than fourteen and almost half of the population was younger than nineteen, and that the baby boomer generations continued this demographic trend, the centrality of the ‘child question’ is not surprising. Thus, with the Yugoslav revolutionary insistence on an inclusive answer to the question Who is public or who should participate in the res publica of the post-war modernisation of the at the time underdeveloped country? not only class and gender, but also generation played an important role. As in the post-revolutionary Soviet Union and in the postwar European welfare states, also in socialist Yugoslavia, as a consequence, within the modernisation efforts huge investments were made into public infrastructures, including education and art and with that also publishing for children. And it was here that Yugoslav women artists, to whom the newly founded art academies also opened, and women writers, especially in some Yugoslav contexts, got a chance to pursue their artistic practice, writing and editorial work. In the talk different reasons for feminisation of the artistic production for children and the question of social construction its value will be contextualised within the different Yugoslav socialist temporalities.

https://www.aau.at/partisaninnenkunst

 

25) Wednesday, 11.8.2023, 9.30-18h

Cross-disciplinary seminar Apologoscapes: (Counter)productivities of apologies in politics, art, and institutional infrastructures, ZRC SAZU, Novi trg 2, 1000 Ljubljana, https://www.zrc-sazu.si/en  

The cross-disciplinary seminar “Apologoscapes: (Counter)productivities of apologies in politics, art, and institutional infrastructures” focuses on exploring the potentialities and pitfalls of apologies in various socio-political and cultural contexts. The seminar aims to define and challenge the existing and non-existing protocols of apology in the context of current calls for coming to terms with the contentious past. Thus apology is also interpreted as a kind of counter paradigms of memory politics. The seminar’s participants will address mainly the discourses and events that resonate with an apology in post-Yugoslav’s (semi)peripheries, while some will reflect on other geo-political and cultural contexts. Moreover, the seminar will try to unleash different effects of issued or missing apologies that can be seen as steps towards engagement, repair and agency, but also as a danger to reaffirm the dominant authorities/power constellations. The pressing questions asked by the seminar will pursue the reasons for different approaches towards apology (and its absence or rejection) in their collective and public dimensions.

Programming and organisational board: Gal Kirn, Katja Kobolt, and Suzana Milevska  

Speakers and programme: (Infra)Structural obliteration and institutional neglect:

Lilijana Burcar (Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana), Katja Kobolt (Institute of Culture and Memory Studies ZRC SAZU), Sanja Petrović Todosijević (Institute for Recent History of Serbia, Belgrade, Martin Pogačar (Institute of Culture and Memory Studies, ZRC SAZU); After erasure and cancelling: Reconciling and impossibility of apology: Gal Kirn (Department of Sociology, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana), Vuk Ćosić (artist), Simon Hajdini (Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana), Jovana Mihajlović Trbovc (Institute of Culture and Memory Studies ZRC SAZU); Performative speech acts of apology in the arts and culture: Suzana Milevska (independent art theorist and curator), Seraphine Appel (Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona/University College London), Michaela Bstieler (University of Innsbruck), Erëmirë Krasniqi (Oral History Kosovo), Rosalyn D’ Mello (independent writer and art critic).

 

26) Wednesday, Thursday, 22.–23.11.2023

Presentation at the International Conference Peace, unconditional. Politics. Histories. Memories. Futures, ZRC SAZU, Ljubljana, Slovenia

Pictures of war, pictures for peace: children as the harbingers of tomorrow

The post-Yugoslav wars (1991–2001) with its culprit culmination in Srebrenica / Potočari genocide (11.–19.7.1995), the first genocide after the WW II in Europe, finalized the dissolution of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (1945–2001) and affected profoundly all of the post-Yugoslav region. Nevertheless, in recent children’s literature of the post-Yugoslav countries one almost in vain searches for depictions of children in war. Whereas before, in socialist Yugoslavia, in all of today’s nationally fragmented yet language-wise (cf. Dekleracija o zajedničkom jeziku) still, but also through translation, cultural, institutional, academic and personal structures, connected literatures, the experience of war was one of the most common motifs of children’s literature. Especially prominently featured was the organized armed resistance against Fascist and Nazi occupying forces and their collaborators in the Second World War (WW II) or the People's Liberation Front (PLA, 1941–1945). In the paper I turn to selected examples from Yugoslav socialist print for children to highlight the overdue discussion on how in the times of ‘more or less permanent war’ (Butler) address children with war and peace?

 

27) Friday, 1.12.2023, 15.30-17.15

Paper presentation at the 55th Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) Annual Convention, November 28, 2023 - December 3, 2023, Philadelphia Marriott Downtown, 1201 Market Street, Philadelphia, PA 19107, USA, Meeting Room 402, 4th, Floor

Introducing New Yugoslav Studies

Chair: Djordje Popovic, UC Berkeley

Papers: Sezgin Boynik, Rab-Rab Press: "Yugoslavia as Uneven and Combined Development"

Belma Buljubašić, U of Sarajevo (Bosnia-Herzegovina): "Yugoslavia as a Cultural Space"

Andrej Grubacic, California Institute of Integral Studies: "Yugoslav is Political"

Dijana Jelaca, Brooklyn College: "Yugo-Futurism: A State that Exists"

Katja Kobolt, Scientific Research Centre SAZU (Slovenia): "Yugoslav Studies: Who, What, How, Why Now, and So What"

Maša Kolanovic, U of Zagreb (Croatia): "Challenging Reduction: Literary and Cultural Intervention in the Field of Yugoslav Studies"

Vladimir Kulic, Iowa State University

https://www.aseees.org/convention/program

 

28) Friday, 2.12.2023, 16.00-17.45

Paper presentation at the 55th Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) Annual Convention, November 28, 2023 - December 3, 2023, Philadelphia Marriott Downtown, 1201 Market Street, Philadelphia, PA 19107, USA, Franklin Hall 2, 4th Floor

11-02 Socialism or Barbarism XI: Reclaiming Socialist Childhood

Chair: Antje Postema, UC Berkeley

Papers: Sanja Petrović Todosijević, Institute for Recent History of Serbia (Serbia): "When Monuments Fall Silent: The Boško Buha Memorial Complex: The Dismissed Symbol of Marginalized Policy of Education and Upbringing of Socialist Yugoslavia"

Barbara Turk Niskač, Tampere U (Finland): "Children's Agency and Yugoslav Self-Management"

Katja Kobolt, Scientific Research Centre SAZU (Slovenia): "Literature Builds Children, Children Build Literature: Participation in Yugoslav Socialist Publishing for Children"

Martin Pogačar, Scientific Research Centre SAZU (Slovenia): "Railways and Dreams: What Happened to the Infrastructures of Socialist Childhood"

Disc.: Antje Postema, UC Berkeley

https://www.aseees.org/convention/program

 

29) Friday, 15.12.2023

Presentation at Kinderliterarisches Kolloquium, online event

Katja Kobolt will present research topics, material and research results of the Picturing Modernist Future: Women Illustrators and Childhood Conceptions in Socialist Yugoslavia. The Children's Literature Colloquium (KLK) is an open platform for networking scholars and aims to promote academic exchange on the topic of Eastern European children's and youth literature and to make research on this subject area more visible. Since 2021, the Colloquium has brought together scholars interested in children's and young adult literature from German-language Slavic studies as well as other departments and institutions with a connection to Eastern Europe to discuss topics in Eastern European children's and young adult literature, to present their research, to realise conferences, publications and other projects, and to promote the integration of topics in children's and young adult literature in research and curricula. The KLK is organised in cooperation between the ZOiS and the Slavic Institutes of the Universities of Halle and Heidelberg.

https://www.zois-berlin.de/ueber-uns/kooperationen-wissenschaft/kinderliterarisches-kolloquium-klk

 

30) 25.5.–14.7.2024

Exhibition with programme for adults, children and school classes: Biba Buba Baja. Creating (for) the Child of Socialism, Center of Illustration/Vodnikova domačija Center, Stritarjeva ulica 7, 1000 Ljubljana

Biba Buba Baja. Creating (for) the Child of Socialism presents the child of the second half of the 20th century and selected artists for children in Slovenia and the former Yugoslavia from a contemporary perspective through an exhibition with a selection of publications, illustrations and positions in contemporary art, as well as film and educational programmes and lectures. The exhibition and programme present the results of the research project carried out by the Institute of Culture and Memory Studies ZRC SAZU and organized in the cooperation with Center of Illustration / Vodnikova domačija, City of Women Association and Slovenian Cinematheque.

PROGRAMME

Saturday, 25.5., 18.00

Exhibition opening and discussion with the artists and makers of the exhibition 

FOR ADULTS:

Thursday, 30.5., 18:00

Illusion and reality in the illustrative work of artists Ljubica Cuca Sokić and Bosiljka Bosa Kićevac / Iluzija i realnost u ilustratorskom opusu umetnica Ljubice Cuce Sokić i Bosiljke Bose Kićevac 

A lecture by art historian Gorana Stevanović (National Library of Serbia)

Tuesday, 4.6., 13.30 to 14.30

I am a book. Which language do you read me in? / Jaz sem knjiga. V katerem jeziku me bereš? 

The lecture by children's book author, librarian and pedagogue Barbara Hanuš on ways to promote multilingualism is aimed at educators and librarians.

Thursday, 6.6., 11.00

Historical Seminar ZRC SAZU: Lecture in English by Dr Dora Komnenović (Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History - ZZF, Potsdam, Germany): Reflections on discarded books and socio-political transformations in (post-)Yugoslavia and beyond

"De-ideologisation" or "libricide"?

Wednesday, 12.6., 18.00

Illustrated literature that quenched the curiosity of the first post-war generations of children: / Ilustrirana literatura, ki je tešila radovednost prvih povojnih generacij otrok. A lecture by the art historian Tatjana Pregl Kobe

Wednesday 19.6., 18.00

Lecture by cultural anthropologist Dr Barbara Turk Niskač (Faculty of Education, University of Tampere, Finland) Children - active co-creators of social reality / Otroci – aktivni soustvarjalci družbene realnosti 

FOR CHILDREN:

Saturday, 1.6., 16:00 to 18:00

How to draw a tree - how to write a poem? / Kako crtamo stablo – kako pišemo pjesmu?

Poetry workshop for children in the BHSC languages or in the "common language"* with poet Šimo Ešić and poetry guest Ismet Bekrić.

Sunday, 2.6. and Sunday, 16.6., 11.00 to 13.00

Family guided tour of the exhibition with the curators Dr Katja Kobolt and Maša Žekš.

The tour will be followed by a collage-making workshop with illustrator Anka Kočevar.

Saturday, 8.6., 16:00 to 17:30

Books are like children / Librat janë si fëmijët

Poetry workshop for children in Albanian with the poet Dije Demiri-Frangu.

YOUTH FILM SCREENINGS at the Slovenian Cinematheque:

Friday, 31.5., 17:00

The Lost Pencil (Izgubljeni svinčnik, Fedor Škubonja, Croatia) (Yugoslavia), 1960, 48', Slovenian subtitles) and The Youth is Building  (Mladina gradi, France Štiglic, Slovenia (Yugoslavia), 1946, 18').

Friday, 7.6., 17.00

Selection of short animated films, Slovenia (Yugoslavia).

Friday, 14.6., 17:00

The Secret of an Old Attic (Tajna starog tavana), Vladimir Tadej, Croatia (Yugoslavia), 1984, 84', Slovenian subtitles.

 PROGRAMME FOR SCHOOL CLASSES

Gallery games – Workshop

After visiting the exhibition, the children will meet the Magic Box, the four illustrator-narrator challenges and the Gallery games can begin. For children aged 7-12 years. 

On the dates: 4, 5, 12, 13, 14, 18, 19, 20, 21 June.

Monday, 3.6., 10.00

The Slovenian Cinematheque

School screening: selection of short animated films, Slovenia (Yugoslavia).

More on the exhibition and the programme: https://ikss.zrc-sazu.si/en/novice/biba-buba-baja-creating-for-the-child-of-socialism

 

31) Monday, 3.6.2024, 9.00-10.30

Presentation at the Conference on cultural education for practitioners and researchers at Cultural Bazar: Potentials of networking, Cankarjev dom Club, Prešernova cesta 10, Ljubljana

https://kulturnibazar.si/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Potenciali-povezovanja-2024_fin.pdf

 

32) Friday, 13.9.2024, 13h

Paper presentation at international conference “War and theatre – A Backward Glance”,  12.–13.10.2024, Kino Šiška, Center urbane kulture Kino Šiška, Trg prekomorskih brigad 3, 1000 Ljubljana

»The Little Prince« Defies Silence. Literary Agency After Migration: Ismet Bekrić, Šimo Ešić, Valerija Skrinjar-Tvrz

Based on interviews with authors and editors of children’s literature, mainly from Bosnia and Herzegovina, who continued their lives and creative paths either in Slovenia or Germany as a result of the war (1992–1995), this paper will analyse the ways and spaces of establishing as well as hindering authorial agency in exile. Following the professional trajectories of children’s writers and editors Ismet Bekrić (1943–), Šimo Ešić (1954–) and Valerija Skrinjar Tvrz (1928–2023), the author will shed light on the institutional forms of production structures, the problems within them, and ask questions about the ideological regimes of the field of intellectual activity in Slovenia and Germany since the 1990s. In this way, the paper will also provide insights into the heterogeneous ways of (non)confronting the fact of the brutal war in Bosnia and Herzegovina within the Slovenian cultural field of the 1990s.

https://maska.si/en/project/war-and-theater-a-backward-glance/