Please join us for this event celebrating the launch of A Slow Burning Fire: The Rise of the New Art Practice in Yugoslavia (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2021). The author, Marko Ilić, will be joined in conversation by Klara Kemp-Welch, to explore how the book reconsiders Yugoslavia’s ground-breaking alternative art scenes in relation to the country’s experience with socialist self-management.
In Yugoslavia from the late 1960s to the late 1980s, state-supported Students’ Cultural Centres became incubators for new art. This era’s conceptual and performance art – known as the New Art practice – emerged from a network of diverse and densely interconnected art scenes that nurtured the early work of Marina Abramović, Sanja Iveković, Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK), and others. In A Slow Burning Fire, Marko Ilić examines Yugoslavia’s New Art Practice in light of the political upheavals of the 1980s.
Marko Ilić is a Teaching Associate in Modern and Contemporary Art History at Cambridge University. Alongside his new book, Marko has published in journals including Third Text and ARTMargins, as well as in edited volumes and museum catalogues. He is currently working on his second monograph.
Organised by Dr Klara Kemp-Welch (Reader in 20th Century Modernism, The Courtauld)
