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Jovana Stokic
Jovana Stokic is a Serbian art historian and critic based in New York City. She curated Best Regards from the Blind Spot: Feminine Representations in Video from Serbia and Montenegro (1976, 2007) at El Centro Cultural Montehermoso in Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain on view in January.
Jana Stojakovic, Dream of the Schizoid Body, 2006. Courtesy of the artist.The exhibition Best Regards from the Blind Spot is conceived as a rather specific insight into the representations of feminine subjectivity. By bringing together eight artists from a region–Serbia and Montenegro–that does not belong to the center of the art world, I am invested in showing that their visual formation of femininity corresponds to and sometimes can even regulate our standardized (and standardizing) viewpoint. The insights provided are purposefully made off-center and they are definitely trans-national. Best Regards from the Blind Spot should be understood as an ironic intonation of a postcard sent from the place where these artists live. Serbia and Montenegro represents a certain “blind spot” of the art world since these young artists (with the exception of Marina Abramovic, and Jelena Tomasevic) are more or less absent from the international art world circuits.
My curatorial choice of the region represented is motivated by a personal investment. I am related to the place of the origin of these works by birth. As national identity is pre-given and therefore not chosen, I try to prove it is not the deciding factor in one’s identity formation. In choosing the non-existing geo-political unit–Serbia and Montenegro, two neighboring countries that were once one country until 2006, and which are now officially separated–I emphasize the arbitrariness of national geo-political definitions. Ironically, the continuing technological and communicational advances in our globalized present do not guarantee equal opportunities for all. Instead of generating a “trans-national community with a shared set of aesthetic and perceptual foundations,” the art world remains structured as a set of multiple hegemonic systems. The video works in this show represent off-center femininities underlying transnational notions of feminisms today. Cosmopolitan subjects in these works are problematizing the notion of the national heritage.
Although critical interventions against what has been called “hegemonic feminism”—the Western brand of feminism that has dominated theory and art practice since the late 1960s—have already appeared in feminist discourse, paradoxically, the practice of women artists from South-Eastern Europe do not belong anywhere: neither to the developed (West) European Union, nor to so-called “Third World.” Often, the works of women artists from this region are instrumentalized to illustrate “belated feminism.” Impossible to be interpreted via binary oppositions—progressive vs. backwards, Eastern vs. Western, European vs. Exotic,—this region is, I argue, a true “blind spot of Europe.”
The exhibition’s point of departure is the work Freeing the Memory of 1976 by the pioneer of video in ex-Yugoslavia Marina Abramovic. The internationally recognized art star Abramovic became sort of the national art heroine for the younger generation of artists (artists shown here belong to my generation X, born in the 1970s). Abramovic proves to be a direct or indirect source of inspiration for generations to come.
The works represented here reflect an intermittent production of video art in Serbia and Montenegro, since there is no continuous history of the medium. This is why—Abramovic’s 1976 video notwithstanding—I chose videos from the most recent production (7 videos are made in the last 3 years). This historic gap in the selection is therefore made on purpose, to show the existence of blind spots in our history, but also to emphasize the diverse contemporary production in this region.
Following major pivotal feminist exhibitions in 2007, (Global Feminisms, Wack!, and Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang) which have powerfully extended the notion of transnational feminisms today, this exhibition plays up the criticality of parafeminism, understood in Amelia Jones’ terms. Jones provocatively reminds us that a term with the prefix “para,” means both “side by side and beyond,” indicated a powerful “conceptual model of critique and exploration that is simultaneously parallel to and building on (in the sense of rethinking and pushing the boundaries of, but nor superseding) earlier feminisms.” For Jones, parafeminism is non-prescriptive, and open to a multiplicity of cultural expressions. In this fashion, I tend to understand that the forms of the feminine represented in these videos are not by any means necessarily “female” subjectivities. These works do not offer positive images of women to reverse masculine stereotypes, nor do offer a specific critique of patriarchy or the male gaze. The critical interventions into the notions of femininity I traced in these representations seem to take their cue from Abigail Solomon-Godeau’s incisive remark: "The notion of femininity seems increasingly unstable a concept, challenged on one hand by a rejection of gender binaries and proliferating categories of sexual identity, challenged on the other for its hopelessly relative and culturalist definitions." My goal is to shed light on processes through which artists work to create representations in order to show the complex femininity formation —the parafeminist subject—articulated via a multiple and relational feminine subjectivity —whose manifestations are present in this show. I believe that is the place where subversion lies.
My goal is to show that these artists are not only relevant in their own countries in which they actively participate in un-doing monoculture, but their exploration of boundaries can have significance within the global culture as well. These women artists are indeed ‘self-positioned on borders,’ while constructing contemporary feminine identities in their cultures. Thus, exploring art practices in the Southern and Eastern boundaries of Europe that incorporated experience of disintegration of both—the former Yugoslavia and the socialist project—sheds light on the formation of feminine identities in the processes of fragmentation (“balkanization”). These practices brought also to attention the existence of manifold differences in feminine representations within larger European, and ultimately, global context.
