Bojana Pejić

Bojana Pejić is (1948, Belgrade) is a curator, independent art historian and lecturer based in Berlin.

Bojana Pejić studied at the History of Art Department of the Faculty of Philosophy at Belgrade University. From 1977 to 1991 she was curator at the Student Cultural Center of Belgrade University, an institution performing the function of an institute for contemporary art, where she organized many exhibitions of Yugoslav and international contemporary art. Since 1991, she has lived in Berlin as a freelance. In 1995, she organized an international symposium, The Body in Communism, held at the Literaturhaus Berlin. In 2005 she defended her Ph.D., “The Communist Body – An Archeology of Images: Politics of Representation and Spatialization of Power the SFR Yugoslavia, 1945-1991” (unpublished).

In 2003 she held the Rudolf Arnheim guest professorship at the Humboldt University in Berlin (history of art, Summer Semester). She was adviser for the project “De/Construction of Monument“, organized by the Center for Contemporary Art in Sarajevo, where she also held seminars at the Academy of Fine Arts, dedicated to the “Communist Body” (2004-2005). She was a Maria Goeppert-Mayer guest professor for International Gender Research at the Institute for Cultural Studies at the University of Oldenburg (2006/2007), and guest lecturer at Central European University in Budapest, where she taught Gender Studies (Winter 2013). She is currently guest lecturer at Bauhaus University, Weimar, with the course “Public Art and New Strategies” (since 2014). She has been taking part in numberless international symposia dealing with the condition of art in post-socialist “Eastern” Europe, many of which have been focusing on a feminist reading of contemporary Socialist and post-Socialist art productions.

She was chief curator of the exhibition After the Wall: Art and Culture in Post-Communist Europe, organized by Moderna Museet, Stockholm (1999), and subsequently presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art – Foundation Ludwig, Budapest, and at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin. She was one of the co-curators of the exhibition Aspects/Positions, held at the Museum of Contemporary Art – Foundation Ludwig, Vienna, in 1999. Between 2002 and 2004 she was one of international advisers of the Contemporary Art Museum in Kumamoto (Japan), where she also curated a retrospective of Marina Abramović (2003), which toured to Morigame (Japan). In 2008 she curated the international exhibition Artist-Citizen, in Belgrade. In 2007 she became curator and research leader of the exhibition project Gender Check – Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe (from the 1960s till mid-1990s), organized by Erste Foundation in Vienna, which opened in 2009. The exhibition presented gender-based works from 24 post-Socialist countries. It was held at the MUMOK in Vienna (2009-2010), and at Zacheta Gallery in Warsaw (2010). She co-curated the international exhibition Good Girls_ Memory, Desire, Power at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC) in Bucharest in 2013, and co-curated the international exhibition Hero Mother: Contemporary Art by Post-Communist Women Rethinking Heroism (Monumentum, Berlin 2016).

Pejic started to write on contemporary art in the early 1970s, and was one of the editors of the theoretical art journal Moment, published in Belgrade (1984-1991). She contributed to Artforum (New York), Art Press International (Paris), Neue Bildende Kunst (Berlin), and to the feminist magazine n.paradoxa (London). She has written extensive essays on Marina Abramović, Sanja Iveković, Valie Export, Jochen Gerz, Maja Bajević, Ilona Németh, Male Leis, in which she has been relying on feminist methodologies. Her articles have been published in art journals and catalogues in Germany, Austria, Poland, Japan, Greece, Croatia, Luxembourg, Great Britain and elsewhere. She was the editor of the anthology Gender Check: Art and Theory in Eastern Europe – A Reader (2010). (2020)

Interviews

• https://testimonies.umprum.cz/bojana-pejic.html
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5yPQNCcEGw