Southern Constellations: the Poetics of the Non-Aligned

Southern Constellations: The Poetics of the Non-Aligned Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova 7 March – 31 August 2019 Moderna galerija, Ljubljana, 2019 5 Zdenka Badovinac Foreword 9 Bojana Piškur Southern Constellations: Other Histories, Other Modernities 25 Chưươư ng-Đài Võ Spirits of Resistance: Asia in the 1950s to the 1990s 33 Samia Zennadi The Construction of Cultural Identity: The Survival Imperative 43 Teja Merhar International Collaborations in Culture between Yugoslavia and the Countries of the Non-Aligned Movement 73 Anej Korsika The World between the Founding of the Non-Aligned Movement (1961) and the Breakup of Yugoslavia (1991) Artists, Institutions and Projects: 80 Dan Acostioaei 82 Art Pavilion Slovenj Gradec 88 Sven Augustijnen 92 Babi Badalov 95 María Berríos & Jakob Jakobsen 98 “Cartography of SFR Yugoslavia’s International Collaborations in Culture with Developing Countries” 104 Godfried Donkor 108 “From Bandung to Belgrade” 112 Gallery of Art of the Non-Aligned Countries “Josip Broz Tito” 116 “Gorgona in Jakarta – on the Cutting Edge of the Edge?” 122 Ferenc Gróf 124 Olivier Hadouchi 128 Aya Haidar 132 Ibro Hasanović 136 Ibro Hasanović in collaboration with Ahmad Adelian, Ahmad Yaman Fetyani, Abdelkadeer Itatahine, Yordanos Haile, Amin Hasan, Romat Hasan, Ahmed Shihab Hammood, Oussama Lahmaza, Masoomah Manafi, Zeinab Manafi 142 Siniša Ilić 144 Naeem Mohaiemen 148 Museum of African Art – the Veda and Dr. Zdravko Pеčаr Collection 152 Museum of Yugoslavia 156 Museum of Solidarity Salvador Allende, Santiago 160 “Re-Aligning the Asian Art Biennale” 164 Dubravka Sekulić 168 Semsar Siahaan 170 “Third World: Prints from the Non-Aligned Countries at the International Biennial Exhibitions of Graphic Arts in Ljubljana between 1961 and 1991” 176 Mila Turajlić 178 Katarina Zdjelar 183 Artists’ Biographies outhern Constellations: The Poetics of the Non-Aligned looks at the role art and culture played in the Non-Aligned Movement and tries to interpret such Sideas in the context of the present day. The question that arises is, why deal with this movement today, or better, why have the ideas and concepts of this movement seen such a resurgence, and with such prominence in art in the past few years? One of the possible answers is that in this time of increasing global ine- qualities, crises, and the widening chasm between the rich and the poor, artists are seeking new ways and means of expression with which to overcome such divisions and perhaps re-establish different, more just global relations. The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), established in 1961 in Belgrade with our former common country Yugoslavia as one of its initiators, consisted largely of Third World African and Asian nations, which found in the movement a framework for a more equal dialogue with the developed countries of the northern hemisphere. While NAM was an almost exclusively political movement, it also recognized the importance of decolonization in the field of art and culture virtually from the begin- ning. Thus, there developed a widespread network of collaborations in culture between non-aligned countries, which is now presented for the first time at the South- ern Constellations exhibition. This presentation includes not only the (mostly political) reasons for the collaborations, but also specific examples of exhibitions, collections, institutions, archives and works of art that formed part of the “southern” constellations. Contemporary artistic interpretations are included in the exhibition in dialogue with the older works. What becomes apparent in the exhibition is not only the heterogeneity of the artistic productions, the variety of the cultural policies, and the extent of the cultural network within the movement, but also – perhaps most importantly – the 5 fact that debates on the significance of art that is not part of the Western art canon have been ongoing since the 1960s. Thus, Moderna galerija in Ljubljana started or- ganizing the International Biennial of Graphic Arts in 1955 and explicitly included prints by artists from non-aligned countries. However, all such expressions, often vastly different from the established Western art canons, failed to bring about the framing of another, different art narrative. Hopefully, our exhibition will open many questions and different views on not only what used to be, but also possible new ways of collaborating in the future, together with new networks and artistic expressions. I would like to thank all of the participating institutions, artists, researchers, curators and writers of the texts in the catalogue for their contributions. We further owe a debt of gratitude to the galleries, individuals, and institutions that have kindly loaned us the works of art and the archival materials and/or given us permission to use them, making the realization of this exhibition possible. Our thanks also to the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union, the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, the Mondriaan Foundation, the Flemish Authority, the Danish Art Foundation and DIRAC Chile, all of which financially supported this project. My specials thanks to curator Bojana Piškur, who conceived and realized this extensive and complex project, to Tamara Soban for preparing the catalogue material, Teja Merhar for researching the copious archival materials, Adela Železnik for the public programs, Mateja Dimnik for public relations, Sanja Kuvel- jić Bandić for coordinating the project, and Ida Hiršenfelder and Marko Rusjan for helping with the coordination. Thanks also to the Moderna galerija technical crew, to Tomaž Kučer, to the Moderna galerija photographers, and to Sabina Povšič for coordinating the photography. Zdenka Badovinac Director, Moderna galerija 6 Interior of the Mulungushi Conference Center in Lusaka, built by Energoprojekt, photographed before the start of the 3rd Conference of the NAM, 8 August 1970 Photo courtesy of the Museum of Yugoslavia Southern Constellations: Other Histories, Other Modernities Bojana Piškur ultural and artistic production in Yugoslavia between 1945 and 1991 is usu- ally interpreted and contextualized within the Eastern European art his- Ctorical narrative. This narrative was largely constructed after 1989, and it was only then the international art world started to become interested in it. If we take, for example, the 1989 exhibition Magiciens de la Terre in Paris, which was one of the first exhibitions in the West to exhibit “global art” on an alleged “equal foot- ing”, we see that the number of artists represented from Eastern Europe1 was quite small. It was only some years later that Eastern European artists, curators and the- oreticians started developing their own locally-rooted narratives and histories; or in other words, they started to reflect2 on the specific context of art in Eastern Europe. This way they also changed the prevailing image of the typical Eastern Eu- ropean artist, who was no longer seen as an “incompletely developed Westerner”. But the difference between Western and Eastern European art was not a matter of different styles and canons. This difference (besides the different political and economic ideologies) was related primarily to the art system, to the conditions of art production and access to official (art) histories. However, the distance between East and West was actually smaller than the difference “between modernism, as a provincial (and exceptional) European conceit, and the art of every other place in 3 the world, especially former colonies”. 1 Marina Abramović, Erik Bulatov, Braco Dimitrijević, Ilya Kabakov, Karel Malich, Krzysztof Wodiczko. 2 See Boris Groys, “Back from the Future”, Third Text, Vol. 17, no. 4 (2003). Groys says that those who refuse to contextualize themselves will be implanted into context by someone else and will then run the risk of no longer recognizing themselves. 3 Katy Siegel, “Art, World, History”, in: Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–1965 (Munich: Haus der Kunst & Prestel, 2017), p. 49. (Catalogue). 9 As for socialist Yugoslavia, there existed another “story” (even though it became largely forgotten after the 1990s), one that was different from that of Eastern Europe – a network that was politically propagated on the basis of Yugoslavia’s foreign relations with the Third World. Yugoslavia was a specific case in socialist Eu- rope. The political machinery realized already in the 1950s that balancing the two opposing Cold War blocs would be a better guarantor of security than would membership in one of the blocs. Subsequently, the policy of peaceful co-existence became a new international orientation, and Yugoslavia started to align itself predominately with Third World countries or the Global South. With Yugoslav membership in the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and the alliance’s first conference in 1961 staged in Belgrade, the concept of non-alignment came to constitute the main component of the country’s foreign policy. Yugoslavia used its specific geopolitical position extensively in the economic sphere, as well as in culture. A special committee was established after World War II called the Committee for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries, which arranged exhibitions outside Yugoslavia’s borders and was chaired by the surreal- ist writer and artist Marko Ristić. Cultural conventions and programs of cultural cooperation4 included not only Western and Eastern Europe, but also non-aligned countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. These exchanges touched

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