Contesting Settler Colonial Accounts: Temporality, Migration and Place-Making in Scarborough, Ontario article co written with: Paloma E. Villegas California State University San Bernardino; Patricia Landolt University of Toronto; Victoria Freeman; Joe Hermer University of Toronto; Ranu Basu York University
https://journals.library.brocku.ca/index.php/SSJ/article/view/2211
A collaborative visual essay on Yugosplaining to the world for the Yugosplaining Project
Collaboration with artists Saša Rajšić, Sonja Zlatanova, Tamara Vukov, Una di Gallo and Žana Kozomora.
UNSETTLING, exhibition catalogue Toronto: Doris McCarthy Gallery at University of Toronto.
Catalogue of the exhibition at the Doris McCarthy Gallery (Summer: June 22 - July 22, 2017 // Fall: September 5 - October 21, 2017), featuring essays by curator Bojana Videkanic; Ranu Basu, Associate Professor, Department of Geography, York University; writer, artist, and cultural manager Elwood Jimmy; and journalist and author Shawn Micallef.
To unsettle means to disturb, unnerve, and upset, but could also mean to offer pause for thinking otherwise about an issue, or an idea. This catalogue seeks to explore and unsettle the site of Scarborough, offering subtle and not so subtle gestures of reversal, of questioning, of disturbance, inviting readers to pause and think about the space and place they occupy.
Lexicon of Tanjas Ostojic and Feminism in Transition
The text examines artist Tanja Ostojic’s interdisciplinary research project entitled Lexicon of Tanjas Ostojić, in the light of feminist materialist theories, participatory art, and socio-political analysis of the former Yugoslav region. Tanja Ostojić decided to frame her project around the lives of women who share her first and last name. Ostojić’s name-sisters became her collaborators as the work turned into a large-scale, long-term project involving 33 women and their personal histories. The women all share a mutual connection to the Yugoslav region that has directly or indirectly shaped their lives through its turbulent recent history. Artist’s intent was to use the stories encountered by collaborating with her name-sisters as a foil to uncover and highlight the connecting personal narratives following Yugoslav wars of succession in the 1990s and in doing so point to the detrimental legacies of war and transition on women’s lives.
In this article, author’s main argument borrows from Karen Barad’s discursive-material ontology to point out that Lexicon activates a form of material feminism which functions intra-actively, in other words, in both its form and content the work recognizes that women’s lives are continuously constituted and re-constituted through multiple linguistic and material formations, or through complex relationships between humans, non-humans, and various discursive and material contexts. In using materialist feminist analysis, the author argues that Lexicon gives primacy to women’s agency and proposes a sustained, growing forms of resistance to the forms of post-socialist exploitation.
In less than half a century, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia successfully defeated Fascist occupation, fended off dominating pressures from the Eastern and Western blocs, built a modern society on the ashes of war, created its own form of socialism, and led the formation of the Nonaligned Movement. This country's principles and its continued battles, fought against all odds, provided the basis for dynamic and exceptional forms of art.
Drawing on archival materials, postcolonial theory, and Eastern European socialist studies, Nonaligned Modernism chronicles the emergence of late modernist artistic practices in Yugoslavia from the end of the Second World War to the mid-1980s. Situating Yugoslav modernism within postcolonial artistic movements of the twentieth century, Bojana Videkanic explores how cultural workers collaborated with others from the Global South to create alternative artistic and cultural networks that countered Western hegemony. Videkanic focuses primarily on art exhibitions along with examples of international cultural exchange to demonstrate that nonaligned art wove together politics and aesthetics, and indigenous, Western, and global influences.
An interdisciplinary book, Nonaligned Modernism highlights Yugoslavia's key role in the creation of a global modernist ethos and international postcolonial culture.
"A rich and original work, Nonaligned Modernism makes an important contribution to the study of art and the politics of culture in formerly socialist Europe, and by extension, to the current conversation within art history about modernist aesthetics and politics in non-dominant nations." Adair Rounthwaite, University of Washington