→ LECTURE

Žarka Svircev

Re-vis(it)ing Neoavant-Garde: Women Artists in Novi Sad

Novi Sad was one of Yugoslavia’s most dynamic neo-avant-garde centres during the 1960s and 70s. The lecture presents the work of artists Bogdanka Poznanović, Katalin Ladik and Judita Šalgo, who were active on the Novi Sad scene in those years, while also part of regional and European artistic contexts. They are multidisciplinary artists, linked with different genres and approaches, exchanging and crisscrossing creative experiences from innovative positions and from artistic and non-artistic areas, highly engaged in the art scene, developing crucial micro-institutions of new creative practice, as well as mediation and networking. The lecture presents the innovative features of these artists. The lecturer also positions their creative practice in a comparative perspective and singles out the feminist platform that they implicitly or explicitly assembled. Feminism as a formative element of the Novi Sad neo-avant-garde is still a marginalized narrative, and the lecture extensively addresses this.

Žarka Svircev Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Literature and Art, Belgrade, in the Periodicals Department for the History of Serbian Literature and Culture. She published the books (in Serbian): Ah, that identity! Deconstruction of gender stereotypes in the work of Dubravka Ugrešić (2010), Vinaver’s Literary Republic (2017), Portrait of the Predecessor: Draga Dejanović (2018), and Avant-Garde Women. Essays on Serbian (Female) Avant-garde Literature (2018). She is the editor of the conference proceedings book Women’s Movement: 1920–1938 (2021) with Jelena Milinković and the editor of collection of papers Becoming a Women Writer in Serbian culture (2022).