Wow! eBook
Contemporary Art in the Post-Yugoslav Space: Case Studies in Hauntology (Routledge Research in Art History)
Author(s): Jonathan Blackwood (Editor), Jasmina Tumbas (Editor)
- Publisher: Routledge
- Publication Date: October 19, 2025
- Edition: 1st
- Language: English
- Print length: 256 pages
- ISBN-10: 103273180X
- ISBN-13: 9781032731803
Book Description
This edited volume is centered on the production, discussion, and consumption of contemporary art in the post-Yugoslav space now. Authors in this volume demonstrate how and why contemporary art discourses have continued to overcome chronic difficulties in local cultural economies since the dissolution of the common federal space of socialist Yugoslavia.
This book focuses on socialist Yugoslavia’s prevailing cultural legacies of anti-fascism, non-alignment, queer and feminist movements, and socially engaged art, which inform and shape contemporary critiques of neoliberal capitalist conditions in the arts. Chapters are rooted in ongoing global challenges in contemporary art: a universal exhaustion through over-work (on the part of the artist/art worker) and over-stimulation (the audience); the structural weakness of contemporary art as a set of institutional activities; and the instrumentalization of art.
The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, contemporary art, gender studies, Slavic studies, politics, and post-conflict studies.
Chapters 1, 10, and 17 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license
Editorial Reviews
Review
"Contemporary Art in the Post-Yugoslav Space: A Case Studies in Hauntology is a timely volume that offers an innovative approach to diverse art-based practices in the context of the urgent necessity to imagine viable alternatives to global neoliberal regimes of violence. Through the analytics of hauntology, this impressive collection embraces a spectral illumination of socialist legacies across a range of critically intersecting considerations related to art/activism during and after Yugoslavia."
-- Dijana Jelača, Brooklyn College, USA
About the Author
Jonathan Blackwood is Associate Professor in Contemporary Art at Gray’s School of Art, Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, Scotland. He is active as a curator and writer and has been working for nearly twenty years in the former Yugoslav space, focusing on cultural ecologies and intersections between the practices of contemporary art and radical politics.
Jasmina Tumbas is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History and Performance Studies in the Department of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies, the University at Buffalo, USA. Her research focuses on queer and feminist interventions, diasporic resistance, and migration in contemporary art. She is the author of "I Am Jugoslovenka!" Feminist Performance Politics During and After Yugoslav Socialism.
