Nottingham Contemporary

Feeding off Contradiction: Self Managed Socialism in Focus

This symposium brings together leading artists and academics in an exploration of the core themes that underpin Nottingham Contemporary’s 2016 exhibition, Monuments Should Not Be Trusted. The conference centres on the principle of self-management (autogestion), an economic and political system which was central to Yugoslav socialism, placing a certain amount of decision making in the hands of the workers themselves. The conference asks how self-management could have been (and whether it was) applied to artistic practice, and what were its potentialities and its failures. Can some of the working methods of self-management be applied to artistic practice today, in a different political system, in a different geography, over thirty years later? What would such initiatives entail? The symposium also explores different forms of critique of Yugoslav self-management. Presentations include a close reading of Black Wave films, a discussion of the student protests in 1968, as well a closer look at New Art Practice and the emergence of punk communities as forms of resistance. Speakers include: Milica Tomić, David Crowley, Zoran Popović, Sanja Iveković, Branislav Dimitrijević, Antonia Majaca, Lina Džuverović and Zoran Pantelić.