Registration REQUIRED by 12pm on October 9, 2025 in order to attend this event.
This symposium explores the cultural and political legacies of the revolutionary Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia through the lenses of art, archives, and film. On the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the end of WWII and the defeat of fascism in 1945, the symposium examines how creative practices that fused art and activism, both official and grassroots, shaped partisan antifascist struggle, socialist revolution and reconstruction, as well as their contested afterlives.
Participants will consider how everyday objects and improvised archives preserve forms of memory often overlooked by official institutions; how art functions simultaneously as political expression and as labor; and how monuments and memorials (tangible and intangible) continue to generate new meanings in the present. Additionally, a series of papers on Yugoslav partisan film will highlight cinema’s role in forging and questioning collective myths, visualizing socialist modernity, and articulating both utopian hopes and post-revolutionary disillusionment.
One of the key questions the symposium addresses is how these Yugoslav partisan archives stage sites of alternative imaginaries in opposition to the dominant global regimes of late capitalist precarity and violence. By bringing visual art, architecture, archives, and film into dialogue, the symposium underscores the complexity of socialist Yugoslavia’s cultural production and its continuing resonance today. Rather than treating revolutionary creativity as a closed chapter of the past, the discussions will invite reflection on how its legacies illuminate broader questions about aesthetics, politics, and collective memory in the present and for the future.
This event is an inaugural symposium of the New York Chapter of the New Yugoslav Studies Association.
Organizing committee: Aleksandar Bošković (Columbia University), Amir Husak (The New School), Dijana Jelača (Brooklyn College), Nace Zavrl (Harvard University)
The event is sponsored by the Njegoš Endowment for Serbian Language and Culture and the East Central European Center at the Harriman Institute.
Conference Program
11:00am – 1:00pm | Panel I: Yugoslav Partisan Art
Discussant / Moderator: Aleksandar Bošković
- Olivera Jokić, Memory Material: A (Small Town) Gathering
- Bojana Videkanić, Partisan Art: Revolution, Class, and Creative Labor
- Vladimir Kulić, Proximity of Monuments
- Ana Janevski & Orfeas Skutelis, Bulkes – The Lost Victory
- Isak Berbic, From the Life of Engineer D.M.
2:30 – 4:30pm | Panel II: Yugoslav Partisan Film
Discussant / Moderator: Dijana Jelača
- Nace Zavrl, Extraction as Aesthetics: Depth in the Yugoslav Landscape
- Sima Kokotović, Yugoslav Filmmakers amidst Anti-Colonial Struggles: Non-Aligned Travels of Yu Partisan Films
- Meta Mazaj, Undoing the Genre of Partisan Film: Ballad About a Trumpet and a Cloud (France Štiglic, 1961), and See You in the Next War (Živojin Pavlović, 1980)
- Amir Husak, Spit and Sing: The Sonic Legacy of Antifascism in the Post-Yugoslav Imaginary
5:00pm | Keynote Address
- Pavle Levi, Dušan Makavejev’s Murderers on the Yugoslavia Express (Speculative Archival Reconstruction of a Latent Film)
