Dr Jasmina Tumbas’ lecture will theorise post-Yugoslav contemporary art through the lens of queer and feminist diaspora. Analysing art from the 1990s to today, this presentation will think through diverse forms of resistance practised by artists after the violent disintegration of Socialist Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Highlighting queer and feminist works by ex-Yugoslav immigrants now dispersed in diasporas, this talk centres questions of gender and race in Eastern Europe, and considers how (dis)integration has shaped the politics of the Yugoslav diaspora today.
Jasmina Tumbas (PhD, Art History, Duke University) is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History & Performance Studies in the Department of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University at Buffalo. She is the author of “I Am Jugoslovenka!” Feminist Performance Politics during & after Yugoslav Socialism (Manchester University Press, 2022), which won the 2023 Barbara Jelavich Book Prize. Tumbas spent fall 2024 as a scholar at the Getty Research Institute, where she conducted research for her second book project, Queer and Feminist Yugoslav Diaspora: Art of Resistance Beyond Nationhood, which is also the recipient of an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. Tumbas serves as a volume editor for the multivolume project Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in Eastern, and South-Eastern Europe (Brill) and is also co-editing the anthology, Contemporary Art in the Post-Yugoslav Space: Case Studies in Hauntology. Her research has appeared in ArtMargins, Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, Art Monthly, Art in America, ASAP Journal, and Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte.
Organised by Dr Klara Kemp-Welch, Reader in 20th Century Modernism, The Courtauld, as part of the research cluster Migrations: People, Borders, Objects.
