Biljana Tanurovska Kjulavkovski, Rok Vevar, Jasmina Zaloznik, Slavčo Dimitrov, Milica Ivic, Igor Koruga: Dancing, Resisting, (Un)working (Aspects of Dance as Cultural, Political, and Art Work in Yugoslavia and After) (2024)

Exhibition

Dancing, Resisting, (Un)working – Aspects of Dance as Cultural, Political, and Art Work in Yugoslavia and After

On Wednesday, November 20 at 7 p.m., the exhibition " Dancing, Resisting, (Un)working – Aspects of Dance as Cultural, Political, and Art Work in Yugoslavia and After " will be opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb.

Developled during four years of collaborative work in the frame of the (Non)Aligned Movements project, and organized by the regional dance network Nomad Dance Academy, this exhibition represents efforts to view contemporary dance in Yugoslavia as a common cultural space that, despite all the political fractures, still survives in its dynamic and unique manifestations.

The exhibition will present materials that bear witness to the work and activities of over 100 artists and artistic collectives, as well as theorists and thinkers who maped the social, cultural, artistic and political transformations of the dance body and dance work.

The team of researchers who worked on the exhibition: Slavčo Dimitrov, Milica Ivić, Tea Kantoci, Igor Koruga, Iva Nerina Sibila, Biljana Tanurovska-Kjulavkovski, Rok Vevar and Jasmina Založnik, while the chief curators are Biljana Tanurovska-Kjulavkovski and Rok Vevar with the curatorial support of Jasna Jakšić. The producer is Marijana Cvetković, and the executive producer is Ana Letunić. The design of the exhibition was done by the artist Siniša Ilić, and the visual identity was created by Andrej Dolinka.

Exhibition "Bodies of Dance: Aspects of Dance as Cultural, Political, and Art Work in Yugoslavia and After" represents long-term research and the creation of a digital archive of contemporary dance and performing arts in our part of Europe. It is not made as a final act through the displayed material, but as another step on the way of building and articulating the relationships that are established through the selected artifacts. This whole process is presented as (un)working material, as a space for research with its various potentials.

Through several chapters, the exhibition focuses on practices, personalities, events and formations that, over a number of decades, show contemporary dance as a social, cultural and artistic practice from which all dance and choreographic languages in our region emerged. Themes of feminism, gender and desire, formations, relationships and self-organization, border-crossing and transgression of dance work, can be traced through photographs, video materials, documents, articles and catalogs collected and preserved for future research and interpretation.

In addition to its aesthetics, contemporary dance is also seen as a field of work that is more inclusive, broader, solidary, common, and challenging. Because of that, this exhibition presents examples of the expanded meaning of dance and choreography, which deal with the working conditions for artists, (de)construction, production and presentation of various presences, absences and representations of the human body, its actions and traces.

As part of the exhibition, the digital dance archive NADA - (Non)Aligned Dance Archive will be officially presented and opened on the website www.nada.nomaddanceacademy.si, which for the first time will offer the possibility of researche, browising and use of archival material from the history of contemporary dance frm the former Yugoslavia.

Additional part of the project is the book accompanying the archive and exhibition " Bodies of Dance: Aspects of Dance as Cultural, Political, and Art Work in Yugoslavia and After", edited by Nika Arhar and Jasmina Založnik, and published by the Service Station for contemporary dance in in cooperation with the NDA partners. With its historical-theoretical position, this book provides a political, cultural and artistic framework in which modern and contemporary dance appears in Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia and North Macedonia. It articulates a number of important features that are addressed or emerge in and through dance practices, and outline a possible point of departure for a wide range of dance works since one hundered years.

The project is another example of the collaborative work of the Nomad Dance Academy network, which will celebrate 20 years of its work in the ex-Yugoslav region in 2025, based on cooperation, self-organization, solidarity, mutual support and resistance to nationalism, chauvinism and neoliberal transformations of culture and society. The network’s members are Station Service for contemporary dance, Lokomotiva, Nomad Dance Academy Slovenia, Nomad Dance Academy Croatia, Object of Dance, Garage Collective and Tanzfabrik Berlin.

The exhibition, dance archive and the book are part of the (Non)Aligned Movements project with the support of the Creative Europe program of the European Union, and the Culture for Democracy program of the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation and Hartefakt.