Reading list - Summer School: Our Many Easts

In the last week of August 2024, Moderna galerija in Ljubljana is organizing its third international summer school, this time entitled Our Many Easts. The 2024 summer school continues to focus on themes related to Eastern Europe, with a special emphasis on the expanded notion and understanding of the East, its arts, artists, art collectives, and the social and political contexts that have defined the geopolitical-social-cultural East(s) over the last decade.

The summer school will offer many different perspectives on the idea of the East(s), starting with the question: What is left of the idea of Eastern Europe today? This broad theme will cover topics such as the legacy of the Eastern European avant-gardes, archives as tools of emancipation, the new 'non-aligned' networks, art in times of conflict and war, ecology and the environment. The summer school will be organized around five themes: The East and Beyond, The Yugoslav Socialist Project as a Source of Knowledge, The Non-Aligned Movement, Film-History-Archives, and Social Ecology.

Reading List

Material related to invited participants and organisations:

Ana Adamović
Claire Bishop, “The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents”, Artforum, February 2006

Mikel Bolt Rasmussen, “A Note on Socially Engaged Art Criticism”, Field. A Journal of Socially-Engaged Art Criticism 6, 2017

Grant H. Kester, “Aesthetic Evangelists: Conversion and Empowerment in Contemporary Community Art”, in: Afterimage no 22, January 1995

Maria Lind, “Complications; On Collaboration, Agency and Contemporary Art”, in: Public 39: New Communities, Spring 2009

Zdenka Badovinac
Zdenka Badovinac, ‘Art Communities at Risk: On Slovenia’, October 178, fall 2012, MIT Press

Zdenka Badovinac, Eda Čufer and Anthony Gardner (eds.), NSK. From Kapital do Capital. Neue Slowenische Kunst. An Event of the Final Decade of Yugoslavia, Ljubljana : Moderna galerija; MIT Press, 2015

Zdenka Badovinac and Terry Smith in conversation, in Terry Smith (ed.), Talking Contemporary Curating, New York: Independent Curators International, 2015

Zdenka Badovinac, Comradeship: Curating, Art, and Politics in Post-Socialist Europe, New York: Independent Curators International (ICI), 2019

Zdenka Badovinac, ‘Peace as a Space for the Third’, e-flux notes, 2023

Claire Bishop, Radical Museology: Or What's Contemporary in Museums of Contemporary Art?, Köln: Walther König, 2014

Boris Groys, ‘Conceptual Art and Eastern Europe: Part II’, in: e-flux Journal 41, January 2013

Boris Groys, ‘Back from the Future’, in Arteast 2000+: The Art of Eastern Europe: A Selection of Works from International and National Collections of Moderna galerija Ljubljana, Bolzano/Vienna: Folio Verlag, 2000


Sanja Horvatinčić
John Berger, 'Stones', in Berger, Hold Everything Dear. Dispatches on Survival and Resistance, London: Verso Books, 2007

Barreiros, I. B., Coelho, R. G., Marcos, P. M., & Pereira, P. S. ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Anachronism: Practices of Monument-making and the Guardians of Historical Consensus’, GSG Magazine for Contemporary Art and Social Issues, Volume 3, 2021

Joachim Yakoub 'Re-Animating the Monumental Spirit of Solidarity of the Paris Commune From Tunis to Réunion Island', The Funambulist, issue 34, 2021

Noori Khosravi, B.. On Top of the Mountain, in Behzad Khosravi Noori, Three or Four Ir/relevant Stories, Art and Hyper-Politics, Stockholm: Konstfac, 2021


Urška Jurman, Mateja Kurir & Polonca Lovšin
Forest Encounters Online Platform

Krater (Danica Sretenović, Gaja Mežnarić Osole)
Gilly Karjevski, 'On curating Ecological Care and Repair', Spotify Podcasts, 2024

Gaja Mežnarić Osole, Danica Sretenović, 'VOICE: Krater project, from feral plant to feral site', Dresden: Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, 2023

Debra Solomon, 'Multispecies Urbanism Department', Spotify Podcasts, 2024

Danica Sretenović, ‘The builder who travels for the sake of travel, Pioneer Railroad (1948–1954–2019...)’ in Martin Bricelj Baraga, Miloš Kosec, and Neja Tomšič (eds.), Nonument, Ljubljana: MoTA – Museum of Transitory Art, 2020

Danica Sretenović and Gaja Mežnarić Osole, ‘Feral Occupations: “Our labor is our infrastructure!”’, Reader of the 35th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts, 2023

Danica Sretenović, 'An Exercise in Feral Cartographies' in Prototyping Collaboration, Berlin: Creative Impact Research Centre Europe (CIRCE), 2023

Curriculum of 'School of Feral Grounds', Future DiverCities, 2023

Tevž Logar
Jorge Luis Borges, 'A New Refutation of Time', in Labyrinths, Selected Stories & Other Writings, New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1962

Adolfo Bioy Casares, 'The Invention of Morel', New York Review Book, 2003

Boris Groys, 'Comrades of Time', e-flux journal 11, 2009

Viktor Misiano, 'The Institutionalization of Friendship', IRWIN, 1998

Igor Zabel, Exhibition Strategies in the 1990's: A few Examples from Slovenia, Zurich: JRP Ringier & Les Presses Du Reel, 2012

Magdalena Ziółkowska, Notes From the Future of Art: Selected Writings by Jerzy Ludwinski, Eindhoven: Van Abbemuseum and Veenman Publishers, 2007


Kumjana Novakova
Saidiya Hartman, 'Venus in Two Acts', Small Axe, 12 (2), 2008


Tanja Petrović
Ana Adamović (ed.), Fiery Greetings: Representative Portrait of the Childhood in Socialist Yugoslavia. Belgrade: Kiosk –Muzej Jugoslavije, 2015

Barbara Turk Niskač, 'The Ambiguous Nature of Children’s Work in Socialist Yugoslavia: An Analysis Based on the Children’s Magazine Pionirski List', The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, 16: 3, 2023

Aleksandar Zograf,.. 'Dečije Novine:From School Magazine to Major Comics Publisher'. Comicalités, Dessins d’enfance dans la bande dessinée, 2023


Bojana Piškur
Bojana Piškur, 'Solidarity in Arts and Culture. Some cases from the Non-Aligned Movement’, L’Internationale Online, 2016

Bojana Piškur, 'The Non-Aligned Movement and Cultural Politics in the Former Yugoslavia', in Lina Dzuverovic c (ed.) Monuments Should Not Be Trusted, Nottingham: Nottingham Contemporary, 2016

Bojana Piškur, 'Southern Constellations: Other Histories, Other Modernities', in Bojana Piškur (ed.) in Southern Constellations: The Poetics of the Non-Aligned, Ljubljana: MG+MSUM, 2019

Bojana Piškur, 'Troubles with the Easts', L'Internationale Online, 2024


Martin Pogočar
E.P. Thompson,The Railway, An adventure in Construction, Sarajevo: British-Yugoslav Association, 1948.

Danica Sretenović, ‘The builder who travels for the sake of travel, Pioneer Railroad, 1948-1954-2019-…’ In Branislav Dimitrijević, Nonument, Ljubljana: MoTA - Museum of Transitory Art, 2020

Harun Šiljak, 'We make the railroad; the railroad makes us', MR Online, 2022

Iva Kosmos, ''What Is There To Talk About With These Women?": The Heterogeneity Of Female Workers And Their Interactions At Fish Canning Factories On The East Adriatic Coast', Narodna umjetnost, 57/1, 2020


Dubravka Sekulić
Non-aligned Movement Communique from 1961- A letter to the presidents of the Soviet Union and the United States announcing the movement's founding.

Mahdi Sabbagh, 'Renewing Solidarity' in Their Borders, Our Worlds: Building New Solidarities with Palestine, London: Haymarket Books, 2024

Dubravka Sekulić, ‘Non-aligned (round) table and its discontents', Fanzine, Reijka, 2021


Mabel Tapia
Cecilia Vicuña, Saborami, Beau Geste Press, 1973,

Mabel Tapia (ed.), Losing Human Form, A Seismic Image of the 1980s in Latin America (second edition), Buenos Aires: Red Conceptuolismos del Sur, 2014

Kollektive Kreativität / Collective Creativity, WHW, Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel (1 May–17 July 2005), Revolver, Frankfurt am Main, 2005

Seda Yıldız, ‘Sharing and Taking Action through Art. Škart Collective (Belgrade), from 1990 to the Present’, in Preparing to Exit: Art, Interventionism and the 1990s, ed. L'Internationale Online, forew. Nick Aikens and David Crowley, L'Internationale Online, 2022.


Mila Turaljić
Mila Turajlić, 'Filmske Novosti: Filmed Diplomacy’, Nationalities Papers , Volume 49 , Issue 3: Special Issue on Internationalism in Times of Nationalism: Yugoslavia, Nonalignment, and the Cold War , May 2021.

Tanja Petrović, ‘Fish Canning Industry And The Rhythm Of Social Life In The Northeastern Adriatic’, Narodna Umjetnost 57/1, 2020.

Zoe Sofia. 'Container Technologies', Hypatia A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 15(2), 2000


Ala Younis
Ala Younis, 'Al Bahithun – Sounds that call to the (oil) fields' in Nelida Fuccaro and Mandana Limbert (eds.), Life Worlds of Middle Eastern Oil Histories and Ethnographies of Black Gold, ed (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023

Ala Younis, 'Nefertiti in a Museum: On Memory and its Artefacts', Podium, M+ Magazine, Issue 2, Hong Kong, August 30, 2019