Yugoslav Aesthetics I: October 75—Fifty Years On

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

In this panel, we explore the recurring returns of October and the complex relationship between history, memory, and actualization, using the counter-exhibition “October 75”, held at the Student Cultural Centre (SKC) in Belgrade fifty years ago, as a starting point. “October 75” was a collective project of artists and critics that ignited debates on artistic labor, self-management, and inequality. It critically engaged with state art institutions through the lens of the 1968 student protests in Yugoslavia and their slogan: “Fight Socialism With Socialism.” We examine how “October 75”—and the broader tradition of October exhibitions at SKC—has been historicized and actualized in contemporary contexts. This includes:

• Re-assessments through projects such as “Political Practices of (Post-)Yugoslav Art/The Case of the Student Cultural Centre of the Seventies” (2009) and “October XXX” (2012), which reflect on Yugoslav history and independent, self-organized artistic practices in the post-Yugoslav space of the early 2000s.
• The contemporary reappropriation of SKC by protesting students and student plenums on February 12, 2025, as a response to decades of privatization and market-driven exploitation of cultural space.


Our discussion situates intergenerational re-enactments of protest and revolutionary movements—from 1968 to the present—within key theoretical frameworks, including: “institution-movement” and “institution-critique” (Jelena Vesić), “politics of memory as performance” (Dejan Vasić), “third position” and artistic peripheries (Zsuzsa Laslo), and articulation of the Self and political awareness (Jelena Ćalić). The panel also considers what it means to begin anew after a revolutionary moment, as expressed in the demands of the Belgrade student plenums in protest (2024/25).

Sub Unit

• Arts I: Visual Culture, Material Culture, Applied and Fine Arts

Chair

• Ana Miljacki, MIT

Papers

• Student Cultural Centre (SKC, Belgrade) as a Site of Self-Production - Jelena Vesic, Independent Scholar

• Performing Memory: From October 75 to October XXX - Dejan Vasic, Stanford U

• The Third Front: From Anti-Imperialist Internationalism to the Provincialization of the West - Zsuzsa László, Museum of Fine Arts Budapest (Hungary)

• Reconfiguring the Apolitical in SKC of 2025: Self-Organization and the Promise of New Politics - Jelena Calic, U College London (UK)

Discussant

• Sanja Bahun, U of Essex (UK)