Remembering 1989 in the Former Yugoslavia,” in Michael Bernhard and Jan Kubic eds., Twenty Years After Communism, Oxford Scholarship Online, 2014, p. This “third way” would prove to be a position of privilege during the Cold War: after the death of Joseph Stalin and normalization of relations with the Soviet Union in 1955, Yugoslavia was able to work with both East and West – eating, as one EU diplomat would later describe it, “from both sides of the banquet table.”( Aida Hozić, “It Happened Elsewhere. In seeking to distinguish their own brand of socialism from that of the Soviet Union, Yugoslav leaders decentralized the economy and introduced a model of self-management, liberalized cultural and artistic life, and positioned the country as equidistant from the two Cold War superpowers by becoming a founding member of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961. These were three decades of dynamic transformation, during which the country was able to successfully establish a unique international identity. The assembled works span the period between 1948, which marked a formal split between Yugoslavia and the Soviet bloc, and the death of long-time Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito in 1980. In seeking to address this situation, the curatorial duo saddled themselves with the ambitious task of documenting the accomplishments – and global reach – of Yugoslav socialist architecture and, in so doing, remapping the history of modern architecture. ( Martino Stierli and Vladimir Kulić, “Introduction,” Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia 1948-1980 (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2018), p. As exhibition curators Vladimir Kulić and Martino Stierli argue in the accompanying catalog, architectural history has repeatedly failed to offer a proper evaluation of the achievements of this region, owing largely to a strong Western-centric bias entrenched both by Cold War discourse and the Orientalist positioning of the region as Europe’s “Other”. The history of Yugoslav socialist architecture has to date largely been absent from the discipline’s canon. In showcasing Yugoslavia’s socialist architecture as a defined and distinct phenomenon, Toward a Concrete Utopia makes an argument for architecture’s capacity to produce a shared sense of history and identity within a highly diverse, multiethnic society. Structured around a set of thematic and biographical sequences, this momentous survey of socialist architecture brought together more than 400 drawings, models, photographs and video installations from a wide range of private and institutional archives across the former Yugoslavia and beyond. New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) recently provided a stage for a vital – and very much on-trend – examination of the brutalist, socialist architecture of the former Yugoslavia, exhibited under the title Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948-1980. Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948-1980, Museum of Modern Art, New York, J–January, 13 2019
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