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Book review by Saša Kesić: Towards Marina Gržinić, Jovita Pristovšek, and Sophie Uitz (Eds.), Opposing Colonialism, Antisemitism, and Turbo-Nationalism: Rethinking the Past for New Conviviality

A book review on the edited volume “Opposing Colonialism, Antisemitism, and Turbo-Nationalism” was published on May 9, 2021 by Saša Kesić in the Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture journal.

Read the full review here.

Saša Kesić is an art teacher and independent researcher from Belgrade. He received his PhD in 2016 from the Department of Theory of Arts and Media, University of Arts in Belgrade. In 2020, he published the book That’s How the Queer Grew… in Contemporary Eastern European Art and Culture, in which he connected queerness, performativity and presentation.

“This volume provides a very comprehensive analysis of what was going on in former Yugoslavia, before the 1990s, in the time of the Balkan war, and after the 1990s. This is a very brave and difficult task as it is not possible to rely solely on the historical distance, as well as on the archives and documents of the past. This is the first time that such an analysis is put in parallel with the two other genocides. Furthermore, a very detailed analysis is presented regarding the changes in Europe at the fall of the Berlin Wall and then in the 1990s until today. The post-Srebrenica genocide time showed an even more bestial situation: that the Serbian society and “the Republika Srpska,”5 instead of reflecting on what happened, pushed a new dimension of amnesia. What we learn is that in Serbia oblivion changed into the glorification of the genocide. This is supported by hyper-populist and monstrous political’ nomenclature all the way to our present day when this volume is published. In the meantime, the same glorification is central for the imperial global capitalist forces – Trump is a very good case. Former Yugoslavia, in its belatedness, is another case, as it repeats on a smaller scale the Trump model. The politicians from Serbia to Slovenia (Aleksandar Vučić and Janez Janša) are such two cases.”

Excerpt from the conclusion of Saša Kesić’ review of “Opposing Colonialism, Antisemitism, and Turbo-Nationalism: Rethinking the Past for New Conviviality” (Marina Gržinić, Jovita Pristovšek, and Sophie Uitz (Eds.), 2020); https://identitiesjournal.edu.mk/index.php/IJPGC/sasakesic.

The review was published on May 9, 2021.

Honorary Mention of the 2022 Ars Electronica Award for Digital Humanity

Marina Gržinić, Jovita Pristovšek, Sophie Uitz have received the Honorary Mention of the 2022 Ars Electronica Award for Digital Humanity for their work Digital Research Travelogues through European Archives!

Digital Research Travelogues through European Archives creates an interdisciplinary platform for art and science to explore the current politics of forgetting in relation to three traumatic events of the 20th century: Belgium (colonialism in the Congo), Austria (antisemitism in World War II and the post-war period), and the former Yugoslavia (turbo-nationalism, Srebrenica genocide). The platform departs from the research conducted as part of the FWF-PEEK project Genealogy of Amnesia: Rethinking the Past for a New Future of Conviviality (AR 439). It was presented as a digital format to promote emancipatory politics in the humanities through the 2020-2021 exhibition at the Weltmuseum Wien, Austria. It consisted of 42 interviews presented as 42 posters with QR codes. This part of the exhibition was a unique artistic-scientific and collaborative research work, presented as an interactive digital installation. The 42 QR codes were divided into three sections, each with a description and content, and accessible to the viewer via mobile phone. Each user could listen to the interviews in English. As a second level of interaction, an interactive table was presented in the exhibition space, allowing the viewer to spend hours exploring the connections between the three sections presented in parallel through images and texts, as a kind of double index, footnotes and hypertexts through European trauma histories. 

Credits: Marina Gržinić, Jovita Pristovšek, Sophie Uitz, and contributors © FWF-PEEK AR 439, Weltmuseum Wien, 2021/22. In collaboration with: Šefik Tatlić, Valerija Zabret, researchers, artists, activists. With support from: Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, various NGOs across Europe

PUBLICATION: Dialogues for the Future: Countering the Genealogy of Amnesia

Dialogues for the Future: Countering the Genealogy of Amnesia, edited by Marina Gržinić and Šefik Tatlić (in collaboration with Valerija Zabret, Jovita Pristovšek, Tjaša Kancler, and Sophie Uitz), Centre for Cultural Decontamination CZKD, Belgrade, Serbia; Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Austria; Peek Project No. AR 439-G24/IBK, 2020, ISBN 978-86-88001-19-9 (CZKD), 312pp.

Download free ebook version here

The book Dialogues for the Future: Countering the Genealogy of Amnesia arose from the research carried out by the PEEK Project No. AR 439-G24/IBK, whose full title is “Genealogy of Amnesia: Rethinking the Past for a New Future of Conviviality.” This is an interdisciplinary arts-and-theory-based research project funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and developed at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, from 2018 to 2020. During this time, we created an online video archive entitled “Countering the Genealogy of Amnesia.” It consists of seventy hours comprising eighty-two interviews/positions as well as the recordings of the symposium “GENEALOGY OF AMNESIA: Crushing Silences, Constructing Histories” held at the mumok in 2018, Vienna, thus tying together the three sites that constitute the “Genealogy of Amnesia”: Belgium, Austria, and Bosnia and Herzegovina/Croatia/Serbia and “Republika Srpska.”

This book comprises sixty-six interviews in the form of deep reflections concerning territories and histories of genocides, dispossession, racism, antisemitism, turbo-nationalism, discrimination, silencing, oblivion: Belgium, Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina/Croatia/Serbia and “Republika Srpska,” Slovenia and Spain.

We hope this book will contribute to establishing links between the antagonization of racism/fascism and the critique of (neoliberal) global necrocapitalism as a colonial, racial system of dominance. It means that we are calling for the severing of ties between Eurocentric epistemology and its monopoly on the definition of class-sensitive, as well as feminist and LGBT*QI discourses.

Centre for Cultural Decontamination CZKD, Belgrade, Serbia
Austrian Science Fund (FWF): AR439
Academy of Fine Arts Vienna

Online book launch at Centre for Cultural Decontamination / Belgrade, 20.9.2020

GoA LECTURE SERIES at PCAP, Vienna Academy of Fine Arts

A series of three lectures by Marina Grzinic and Sophie Uitz is held during the summer term 2018 at the Post-Conceptual Art Practices study programme (Vienna Academy of Fine Arts). Each of the lecture includes a screening of documentary film and introduces one of the three research territories of the “Genealogy of Amnesa” to the students.

 

Part I
Belgian Colonialism in the Congo
23 April 2018, 4-7 PM

Presentation of the research project “Genealogy of Amnesia: Rethinking the Past for a New Future of Conviviality”, by Marina Grzinic and Sophie Uitz.

Introduction, screening and discussion of “King Leopold’s Ghost” (2006, 108min, documentary) by Pippa Scott and Oreet Rees – a documentary about the exploitation of the Congo by King Leopold II of Belgium, based on the book by Adam Hochschild King Leopold Ghost from 1998.

Part II
The Yugoslavian War
14 May 2018, 4-7 PM

Introduction, screening and discussion of Valentini Areh’s documentary “Radovan Karadzic’s Secret Plans” (2016, 51min, documentary for television).

The TV film shows newly retrieved materials and accounts obtained at the trial of Radovan Daradzic at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, Hague Tribunal. The documentary was premiered two days before the final sentence to Karadzic at the Haag Tribunal, 24 March 2016. Karadzic was sentenced to fourty years for Srebrenica genocide in BiH, Amont other criminal acts.

Valentin Areh is a Slovenian journalist, war correspondent and writer. He participated in 1991 as a soldier in the short Slovenian war for independence. He subsequently attended Ljubljana University, studying history and sociology. Areh has fiftenn years of experience as a war correspondent in places such as Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Chechnya, Afghanistan and Iraq. He was one of the few journalists to remain in Kosovo during the Kosovo War of 1999 and he survived a tortuous escape out of the country during NATO’s war to expel Serbian forces.

Part III
Remembrance and oblivion of Nazi crimes in Austria
4 June 2018, 4-7 PM

Screening of “Night and Fog” (French original title: Nuit et brouillard; 1956, 32min, documentary short film). Directed by Alain Resnais, it was made ten years after the liberation of Nazi concentration camps. The title is taken from the notorious “Nacht und Nebel” (German for “Night and Fog”) program of abductions and disappearances decreed by the Nazis on 7 December 1941.

Screening of “East of War” (German original title: Jenseits des Krieges; 1996), a film by Ruth Beckermann (cinematography Peter Roehsler, editing Gertraud Luschützky).
White-tiled rooms, neon lighting; on the walls black and white photographs documenting the atrocities committed by the German Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front in WW2. Against this background former soldiers talk about their experiences beyond the bounds of “normal” warfare. An uncompromising film on remembrance and oblivion. Ruth Beckermann’s film doesn’t duplicate the exhibition, but begins where it ends: in a commentary. Its subject-matter is less about history than remembering, less about the past than the present.

Online BOOK LAUNCHES

Presentation and discussion with the editors of the three recent publications of the “Genealogy of Amnesia” project research.

All 2020 presentations are held online due to restricted mobility during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Booklaunch Sarajevo

22.12.2020, 18.00h
Association for Culture and Art, Crvena, Sarajevo / ZOOM

Presentations by:
Marina Gržinić, professor, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
Jovita Pristovšek, Šefik Tatlić, postdoc researchers, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna

The program will be held in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian.

Booklaunch Vienna

19.11.2020, 19.00 h
Depot Wien / ZOOM

Presentations by:
Marina Gržinić, professor, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
Jovita Pristovšek, Šefik Tatlić, Sophie Uitz, postdoc researchers, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna

Booklaunch Zagreb

15.10.2020, 19.00 h
Multimedia Institute/MaMa, Zagreb, Croatia / ZOOM
Organized by Lina Gonan and MaMa

Presentations by:
Marina Gržinić, professor, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
Jovita Pristovšek, Šefik Tatlić, postdoc researchers, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna

The program will be held in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian.

Booklaunch Belgrade

29.09.2020, 19.00 h
Centre for Cultural Decontamination CZKD, Belgrade, Serbia / ZOOM
Organized by Aleksandra Sekulić and CZKD  (director: Ana Miljanić)

Presentations by:
Marina Gržinić, professor, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
Jovita Pristovšek, Šefik Tatlić, postdoc researchers, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna

The program will be held in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian.

Online Artist Talk Series 2021 “Stories of Traumatic Pasts”

All events will be held in English. The events will take place online!
Registration: info@weltmuseumwien.at

Adela Jušić in conversation with Marina Grzinić
Friday, February 19, 2021, 04:30 PM Amsterdam, Berlin, Rom, Stockholm, Wien

Adela Jušić was born on 1982 in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Jušić has exhibited in more than 100 international exhibitions (Manifesta 8, Murcia, Spain; Videonale, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany; Image Counter Image, Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany, Balkan Insight, Pompidou Center, Paris). In 2010 she won Young Visual Artist Award for the best young Bosnian artist in 2010, Henkel Young Artist Price Central and Eastern Europe in 2011, and Special award of Belgrade October Salon in 2013.

Martin Krenn in conversation with Marina Grzinić
Tuesday, March 16, 2021, 07:00 PM Amsterdam, Berlin, Rom, Stockholm, Wien

Elisabeth Bakambamba Tambwe in conversation with Marina Grzinić
Tuesday, March 30, 2021, 07:00 PM Amsterdam, Berlin, Rom, Stockholm, Wien