Dunja Blažević

Dunja Blažević (1944, Zagreb) is an art historian, art critic, and curator. Blažević is a seminal figure in the intersecting histories of performance, conceptual, new media, video art, and burgeoning feminisms during the era of socialism in Yugoslavia and Eastern Europe, as well as in the post-socialist European cultural landscape of contemporary art.

Originally from Zagreb, Blažević’s family moved to Belgrade in 1962. Seeking independence from the large shadow cast by the political career of her father Jakov Blažević—who served as chief prosecutor in the highly publicized case against anti-communist archbishop Alojzije Stepinac in 1946, and who held high positions as prime minister and president in the Yugoslav Socialist Republic of Croatia—Blažević remained in Belgrade after her family’s return to Zagreb.

An art historian by training, Blažević earned her degree at the University of Belgrade in 1969 and held a Fulbright fellowship at Georgetown University (Washington, D.C.) and UCLA (Los Angeles) from 1971–1972. She pursued postgraduate studies on cultural policy at the Faculty of Political Sciences at the University of Belgrade (1974–1975).

A leading voice in the alternative cultural milieu of socialist Yugoslavia during the 1970s and 1980s, Blažević was a founding member of the Student Cultural Center (Studentski kulturni centar, SKC) in 1968, and served as the director of its gallery from 1971–1975. From 1976–1980 she was the director of the SKC. Under Blažević’s leadership, the SKC Gallery was the first to exhibit conceptual, performance, and new media art in socialist Yugoslavia. Generating international artistic and intellectual exchanges that probed the social and political power of experimental art, Blažević put Yugoslavia’s New Artistic Practices on the radar of prominent cultural figures in contemporary art, such as Joseph Beuys, Ana Mendieta, Gina Pane, Germano Celant, Ursula Krinzinger, and Richard Demarco.

In addition to her pioneering curatorial work in the sphere of contemporary art at the SKC, the context of which launched performance artist Marina Abramović's famed international art career, Blažević organized the first feminist events at the SKC, such as holding the Women in Art discussion in 1975, as well as the 1978 feminist conference Drug-ca žena. Žensko pitanje – novi pristup? [Comrade-ess Woman. The Women’s Question: A New Approach?]. A groundbreaking moment in the history of feminist art and activism in Eastern Europe, Drug-ca žena was a collaborative effort that included the leadership of feminist sociologist Žarana Papić, and curator and art historian Bojana Pejić, then the assistant for the SKC Gallery, who by the 2000s would become an influential feminist art critic and curator in contemporary art.

Blažević would leave the SKC to work as the editor-in-chief of the visual arts program at TV Belgrade from 1980–1991, where she first edited the TV show The Other Art, followed by serving as producer and director of TV Gallery (1984–1991), which centered innovative work in new media and video art. Opening up elite contexts of experimental art to mass audiences in Yugoslavia, Blažević produced over 90 shows.

With the onset of the Yugoslav wars in 1991, Blažević moved to Paris, where she worked as a freelance art critic and curator until 1996, when she became the director of the Soros Center for Contemporary Art in Sarajevo (renamed in 2000 as Sarajevo Center for Contemporary Art, SCCA). There, among other efforts to support the war-torn cultural sphere, Blažević buttressed the work of young generations of women artists. During her tenure at SCCA (1996–2016), she also co-curated Aspects/Positions: 50 Years of Art in Central Europe 1949–1999 (Vienna, 1999–2000), a landmark exhibition in the history of Eastern and Central European contemporary art, and curated the section on Bosnia and Herzegovina for the exhibition In the Gorges of the Balkans (Kassel, 2003), which featured what would become one of the most distinguished feminist artworks from the region, Šejla Kamerić's Bosnian Girl (2003). From 2004 to 2007, she led the SCCA’s multidisciplinary regional project, “De/construction of the Monument,” which challenged nationalist paradigms of erasure and destruction in the post-Yugoslav region. Blažević served as an expert for Gender Check: Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe (Vienna, 2009), and in 2012, she curated the exhibition Dowry, which highlighted feminist artists from Sarajevo, Belgrade, Ljubljana, and Zagreb. (2024)

Publications

• "Idealna žena u ‘ženskoj’ štampi" [The Ideal Woman in “Women’s” Press], Književne novine 32:601, 29 Mar 1980, p 29. [1] (Serbo-Croatian)

• "Who Is That Singing over There? Art in Yugoslavia and after 1949–1989", in Aspects/Positions: 50 Years of Art on Central Europe 1949–1999, ed. Lóránd Hegyi, Vienna: Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, 1999, pp 92–93. (English)

• "West-East Side Story", trans. Nicole Dizdarevic, art press: Ecosystèmes du monde de l'art 22: "Pratiques, marché, institutions, mondialisation", Paris: Art Press, 2001. (French)
  • "East Side Story; Local / Global", in i_CAN_Reader, 2003. Trans. of excerpt. [2]

• "Bosnia", in In the Gorges of Balkan: A Report, ed. René Block, Kassel: Kunsthalle Fridericianum, 2003, pp 14–15.

• "Art as a Form of Ownership Awareness" and "SKC and New Cultural Practices", in The Case of Students’ Cultural Centre in 1970s: SKC and Political Practices of Art, ed. Prelom kolektiv, Ljubljana: ŠKUC Gallery, 2008, pp 7; 81–84.

• "TV Gallery", in Political Practice of (post-) Yugoslav Art: Retrospective, eds. Jelena Vesic and Zorana Dojić, Belgrade: Prelom kolektiv, 2010, pp 156-161.

Interviews

• Vesna Kesić, "Dunja Blažević: Aktivistkinja avangarde", Start 340, 13 Feb 1982, pp 48-49. (Serbo-Croatian)
  • "Dunja Blažević: The Activist of the Avant-Garde" [1982], intro. Jasmina Tumbas, trans. Suzana Vuljevic, in Texts and Contexts from the History of Feminism and Women's Rights: East Central Europe, Second Half of the Twentieth Century, eds. Zsófia Lóránd, Adela Hîncu, Jovana Mihajlović Trbovc, and Katarzyna Stańczak-Wiślicz, Budapest: Central European University Press, 2024, pp 951-961. (English)

• Mara Traumane, "Interview with Dunja Blaževića on Her Research in Bosnia and Herzegovina", Gender Check: Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe, Vienna: ERSTE Stiftung, Spring 2009. (English)

• "Interview with Dunja Blažević on the role of Soros Centers for Contemporary Art - SCCA in the region and the conditions of art production in the 90s, Sarajevo", Novi Sad: kuda.org, 2017, 23 min. Video.

• "Dunja Blažević: Umetnost i vlast" [Art and Power], in Project Yugoslavia, Belgrad: Museum of Yugoslavia, 2019, 6 min. Video.

Literature

• Jasna Tijardović-Popović, "Performance Art in Belgrade in the 70s. On the Exhibition of Photo-Documentation and Photographs", in Performans/1968–1978 / Performance/1968–1978, ed. Jasna Tijardović-Popović, Belgrade: Prodajna galerija Beograd, 2006. (Serbian)/(English)

• Branka Ćurčić, "Television as a Symbol of Lost Public Space", transform, Vienna: eipcp, 12 Dec 2007.

• Chiara Bonfiglioli, "Belgrade, 1978. Remembering the conference «Drugarica Žena. Žensko Pitanje – Novi Pristup?»/ «Comrade Woman. The Women’s Question: A New Approach?» thirty years after", Utrecht: Research Institute for History and Culture – Faculty of Humanities, Utrecht University, Utrecht, 2008. MA thesis. [3] (English)

• Svetlana Slapšak, "Mein Feminismus ist eine logische Konsequenz von 1968" [My Feminism is a Logical Consequence of 1968], in 1968 in Jugoslawien: Studentenproteste und kulturelle Avantgarde zwischen 1960 und 1975, eds. Boris Kanzleiter and Krunoslav Stojaković, Bonn: Dietz, 2008, pp 92-103. (German)

• Bojana Pejić, "Proletarians of All Countries, Who Washes Your Socks? Equality, Dominance, and Difference in Eastern European Art", in Gender Check: Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe, ed. Bojana Pejić, Vienna: Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, and Cologne: Walter König, 2009, pp 19-29. (English)

• Jelena Vesić, "The Conference Comrade Woman – Art Program (On Marxism and Feminism and Their Mutual Political Discontents)", in Parallel Chronologies: Collection of Exhibitions in Eastern Europe, 1950-1989, n.d. (English)

• Branislav Jakovljević, Alienation Effects: Performance and Self-Management in Yugoslavia, 1945–91, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016, passim. (English)

• Zsófia Lóránd, The Feminist Challenge to the Socialist State in Yugoslavia, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, passim. (English)

• Jon Blackwood, "On Women’s Video Art in the context of Yugoslavia, 1969–91", in EWVA: European Women's Video Art in the 70s and 80s, eds. Laura Leuzzi, Elaine Shemilt, and Stephen Partridge, John Libbey, 2019, pp 55-66. [4] (English)

• Jasmina Tumbas, “I Am Jugoslovenka!” Feminist Performance Politics During & After Yugoslav Socialism, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022, pp 25-26, 47-50. (English)

• Vesna Vuković, "The Feminist Dowry of Dunja Blažević", AWARE: Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions, Sep 2022.
  • "La dot féministe de Dunja Blažević", trans. Lucy Pons, AWARE: Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions, Sep 2022. (French)

See also

• Drug-ca
• SKC
• SCCA