Jasmina Tumbas: (...) Feminist performance politics during and after Yugoslav Socialism

Micro and Macro Stories of Women Artists of Former Yugoslavia and Balkans
Online Symposium by #InstitutoSusch
Web stream from 5 December 2023
This seminar is a part of the long term research, conduct by Instituto Susch, devoted to women artists
Lecture: #JasminaTumbas
”I am Jugoslovenka!": Feminist performance politics during and after Yugoslav Socialism
Dr. Tumbas will be speaking about her book, "I am Jugoslovenka," in which she argues that queer-feminist artistic and political resistance were paradoxically enabled by socialist Yugoslavia's unique history of patriarchy and women's emancipation. Spanning performance and conceptual art, video works, film and pop music, lesbian activism and press photos of female snipers in the Yugoslav wars, the book analyses feminist resistance in a range of performative actions that manifest the radical embodiment of Yugoslavia's anti-fascist, transnational and feminist legacies. It covers celebrated and lesser-known artists from the 1970s to today, including Marina Abramović, Sanja Iveković, Vlasta Delimar, Tanja Ostojić, Selma Selman and Helena Janečić, along with music legends Lepa Brena and Esma Redžepova. "I am Jugoslovenka" tells a unique story of women's resistance through the intersection of feminism, socialism and nationalism in East European visual culture.
Jasmina Tumbas: PhD, Art History, Duke University) is an 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 is currently working on a second manuscript, Queer and Feminist Yugoslav Diaspora: Art of Resistance Beyond Nationhood and serves as the volume editor for the multivolume project Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in Eastern, and South-Eastern Europe IV: 1990s and after (Brill). She is also co-editing the anthology, Yugoslav Hauntologies: Case Studies in Post-Yugoslav Art. Her research has appeared in ArtMargins, Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, Art Monthly, Art in America, ASAP Journal, and Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte.