It’s No Accident Socialism Started Here: A Conversation with Zdenka Badovinac

By Jake Yuzna

Jan 29, 2024

Walker Publishing Filed to Visual Arts · Part of Solidarity in Unraveling Worlds

Zdenka Badovinac. Photo by Igor Andjelić.

Raised in a country that no longer exists, Slovenian curator and writer Zdenka Badovinac emerged as a pioneering voice in conceptualizing Eastern European art from the fall of Yugoslavia through the turn of the millennium and today.

Appointed director of the Moderna galerija in Ljubljana from 1993 until a newly elected conservative government chose not to renew her contract in 2020, Badovinac curated a series of pioneering projects on Slovenian and Yugoslavian art, including the Body and the East–From the 1960s to the Present, NSK from Kapital to Capital: Neue Slowenische Kunst–The Event of the Final Decade of Yugoslavia, as well as the formation of the Arteast 2000+ Collection, the foremost and seminal collection of postwar avant-garde Eastern European art.

Most recently the director of the Zagreb Museum of Contemporary Art in Croatia, Badovinac sat down to discuss commandership, the potential of minority positions, and how rethinking socialism might help tackle life in unraveling worlds today.

Jake Yuzna

Where are you from?

Zdenka Badovinac

I am from Slovenia and was born in a small town on the border between Slovenia and Croatia.

JY

What was your relationship to art when you were growing up in what was then Yugoslavia?

ZB

The city I come from is very small, with only one local historical museum. You could see art here and there, but it wasn’t really the place for art. When I was a teenager, I hung around with a group of young people who were very active. They had knowledge on art and culture as well as [were] very critical about everything in terms of politics and society.

As part of this group, I helped start a youth magazine where we wrote about art and society. We started a pioneering ecological project about one of our local rivers that we discovered was being polluted. After discovering it, we organized the people in the village and went to the Slovene government to make change happen.

I think this was very formative for me. Yeah, I was, since my teenager years, very much into art, society, critical thinking. That I think was my drive since I was very young.

JY

I’m curious, as someone raised in the West but coming from Slovenian heritage, there seems to be more collaboration in Slovenian art, philosophy, and culture. Dating back to World War II, and perhaps even further, there is a history of artists and other cultural workers collaborating as a group in order to make spaces, artwork, magazines, philosophy movements, and the like. Do you think there’s a unique reason that collaboration seems to be so common in the region?

ZB

During this period that you speak of in Yugoslavia, after World War II, we had a self-management system, which was unique in terms of socialist countries. Every municipality had a cultural youth center, where young people could be creative, produce films, make exhibitions.

There was an idea to have a decentralized structure with everything happening on the municipality level. But this collective approach was probably present because it has been present in the Balkans for a very long time, long before Yugoslavia existed. It seems to be something present in the habitus of Slavic people. I only am guessing, because I haven’t researched that deeply in these ancient histories, but I think about it as something very embedded in the tradition of people here. It wasn’t an accident that socialism started here.

We can start speculating about history a lot, but to speak of the periods I’ve experienced, socialism was what we learned while growing up. We learned about the collectivism solidarity in kindergarten. Being with and collaborating with people was a part of everything. The former Yugoslavia was made up of these small cities and small environments. We didn’t have big cities like New York or Paris. I don’t believe that in such big cities something like that would be possible.

For instance, when you go out in Ljubljana, you meet people all the time. You communicate in the street, and I think this is very unique. When I go out, I always meet somebody, a friend or a colleague, and have a chat about my work and my family. We talk about private and professional things. This is unique, I would guess.

This collective habitus is crucial. That’s why it was so natural that young people who were interested in something would form groups or collectives.

JY

Then how did you become a curator at the Moderna galerija? Did you start straight out of university?

ZB

I went straight from the university. My diploma work was awarded with a Prešeren Award. This is one of the most important awards in Slovenia. I received a student award, but there are higher-level awards given for things like the best cultural workers or artists. When I received that award, I also met the director of Moderna galerija by chance. This led me to doing a small exhibition after my diploma. Then, I got a job and stayed there until 2020. If the autocratic regime hadn’t come into power at that time, I would probably have stayed there forever.

JY

How did cultural institutions, both official and alternative, change once Yugoslavia dissolved in 1991? Was there a feeling of a major shift in society, or did it feel like “new day, new country”?

ZB

I was lucky because I was young curator working in Moderna galerija during socialism at the end of the 1980s. I was in touch with this kind of socialist atmosphere in the institutions. I was listening to old curators, and I got the idea [that] what we thought about institutions, about art, was fairly innocent. We never connected art and money or institution and market, which is normal today. Other than an important biennial that began in 1955, Slovenia didn’t connect much internationally.

I came up with a group of other young curators, such as Igor Zabel, who were all very ambitious and wanted to change that. I tried to work internationally immediately and somehow succeeded with a series of small exhibitions.

I always say that I learned more from the artists than from the politics. For instance, the famous Slovenian artist group Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK) was operating during this time in the 1980s. NSK and other groups were already involved in a lot more international communication than any of the politics. NSK and I started working on different things together, and I learned a lot. Then the war started. With the war came new questions, new ideas, new orientations, and new visions of the museum. For instance, we collaborated with Zagreb as a gesture of solidary.

During this time, in 1993, I became the director. Since I was only 35 years old at the time, I was pretty inexperienced but also very enthusiastic. This led to me turning to Eastern Europe issues, with projects like Body and the East, and a later one, the Collection.

JY

How did the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova come about? Was there always a hope or plan to create a second contemporary museum to complement Moderna galerija?

ZB

No, it wasn’t like that. It’s more complicated. After the war in Slovenia, the Yugoslav army left Slovenia and emptied a lot of army buildings. Metelkova is the former Yugoslav Army barracks complex.

After the war, in 1994, the Slovenian government offered the institutions the use of Metelkova. Moderna galerija was asked if we would need one of the buildings in the army barracks, and I said,  “Yes, of course we need [it] for the storage.” Later, when I went and saw the building, I said, “It’s much better for something else.”

We very rapidly had to conceive of an idea [about] what would be there. Serendipitously, we got a donation of important Slovenia sculpture, and we proposed exhibiting this donation there as well as part of our collection. They gave us the building and then, in 2000, Manifesta Three was staged in Ljubljana, and we offered those curators the use of the main Moderna galerija building.

That left our own Manifesta project, the first presentation of the 2000+ Arteast Collection, without space. And then we said,  “Why not the under-renovated museum?” This led to the presentation of the collection in the under-renovated Army building, which was fantastic. At the time Eastern European art was pretty unknown, especially not in terms of a more complex narrative or a collective presentation of it. Some of the artists were known, but most of them were not. It was a big success.

Around the same time, we had to present again and again the reasoning behind why we still needed the building and why it should be renovated. Pointing to the success of the presentation of the 200+ Arteast Collection, we argued that we needed the building so the collection of Eastern European art could have a permanent home.

It still took years after that. Finally, in 2011, the building was finished being renovated and the collection was installed. Now, Contemporary Art Metelkova still houses that collection as well as other exhibitions and programs.

JY

When did the Arteast 2000+ Collection come about? From my understanding it was a complex collaboration, both internally and outside of the museum as well.

ZB

In 1998, I did the exhibition Body and the East, which proved that it was important to do something with Eastern European art. This led to many discussions with people in Ljubljana, not only in the museum, but more with artists from Ljubljana, including the IRWIN Group, who were very important.

Back in the beginning of the 1990s, the IRWIN Group had staged their project, the NSK Embassy, where they created a month-long live installation in the form of an embassy in Moscow with a program of lectures and public discussions. This brought together a group of us with Russian intellectuals, cultural workers, and philosophers to consider the question of Eastern European art from different angles. Igor Zabel, me, and others from the art scene were all a part of it. This helped guide our approach to forming the Arteast 2000+ Collection, which is the first museum collection conceived with a focus on Eastern European postwar avant-garde art in a broader international context.

The project was a result of different issues we faced in the 1990s, such as the war and a need to relate us to the international world. In the beginning of the nineties, one of the crucial agendas was internationalization. We ask ourselves, “What kind of internationalization do we want?”

How to conceive of and approach this international context became very important. For me, international context is not something universal, but it’s always concrete. Our international context was clearly related to this post-socialist world. Of course, we were also discussing the questions of identities in the nineties. Although I think that we never really declared that an Eastern European identity in any essential terms existed.

It was interesting because the idea of socialism was just opposite any idea of identity. This led to a questioning of socialism as something universal that unites Eastern European culture. The idea of socialism was treated as something more universal. For this group—let’s call it, Ljubljana circle of people, who worked with the question of Eastern Europeanness—it was never about this identity. Instead, it was always about the question of socialism and that being something beyond identity.

There was also the question of our lack of history, in terms of comparing to a Western, hegemonic narrative. We always said, “In east Eastern Europe, there are only fragments of stories, but never histories on Eastern Europe.” It was also difficult to talk about Yugoslav art history. This was very interesting. Today, there are very black and white ideas about this, dealing with Eastern European art, like questions of identities. For us, back then, it was not about that.

Instead, it was about a commonality where socialism and the material conditions [intersected], which included the infrastructure with the question of industry history. Infrastructure included art market, discursive field, the history, institutional work, collections, archives, and so on. Here, we found certain commonalities of different degrees. Yugoslavia, Romania, and Albania were all very, very different, but still they had things in common, like not being integrated in the international art market.

There were museums in Yugoslavia and some international collections, but there was no responsibility to the postwar avant-garde, who were pretty marginalized. However, a new generation of people came and said, “Yeah, but this is more about a stereotype about Eastern European art.” That there is this nonofficial art, but an emancipatory potential in socialist modernism in the partisan monuments, which became very popular after the war. It is all very complex, of course.

JY

For me, again as someone raised within and therefore entrenched within the Western context and perspective, I have noticed that in Slovenia it seems like artists, curators, philosophers, and other thinkers almost always start by framing the ideology that gives form to the context of their work and of the discussion it is operating within.

ZB

You think this is very specific for Ljubljana?

JY

At least for Slovenia, although I can’t speak for the rest of Yugoslavia. We don’t do that in the West. For instance, I remember seeing an exhibition at Moderna galerija where, instead of an artwork, the emails, meeting notes, and proposals between a curator and artist that documented the breakdown of a new artwork was presented. It was all so unflinchingly transparent, and I was sort of shocked. I can’t imagine that kind of dialogue, around how the ideology that forms the political context of a museum and therefore influences the production and exhibition of artwork, happening in the West.

ZB

Probably yes. I think we are pretty unique. This is exactly probably because of the things that you mentioned, because of our specific interests in ideology. I think that my generation was formed along with the Neue Slowenische Kunst, whose work directly engaged with ideology and how it forms institutions and contexts.

It was not only about them, but also about the philosophical circle, the Lacan School, a group of theorists in the seventies and the eighties who formed a very fertile ground for this kind of thinking about how ideas always relate to the context, society, critique, and so forth.

JY

Artist groups like IRWIN and NSK keep coming up as we talk. Since they are known for utilizing organizational structures, such as a museum or a theater troupe, and then through that repetition make them more visible, critique them, and in some ways push new models forward, I’m curious if you have any thoughts on why that approach to artmaking formed out of Ljubljana and Slovenia at that time? Do you think it was the influence of socialism? Or from previous generations of artists?

ZB

I don’t know. This phenomena with NSK became very visible when I curated their retrospective. I named their approach “institutional building” instead of “institutional critique.” By doing this, I looked to say that institutional critique was [a] genre with a universal ambition that was formed and articulated in the West before being pushed to other parts of the world to use. Institutional critique was formed somewhere else where the interests and conditions were very different.

It was clear with the groups you mentioned that there was an ambition to operate internationally, but locally there wasn’t the adequate support to do so. At that time, most of the public money was used for cultural production, which hasn’t changed much. One of their ambitions, and one of the methods of their work from the beginning, was also the cultural production as a content. They kind of deconstruct the ideology, imaginary, context, but at the same time, especially it was clear in IRWIN, they tried to juxtapose the method of the work to the content.

Both these things became part of the work and, through the combination of these two principles, these artists tried to change the real conditions of how work could be made locally. For instance, NSK established a fourth group, The New Collectivism, focused on design. Each of the founding groups that made up NSK delegated one of the members to The New Collectivism that designed all the catalogues, exhibitions, and so on. One of The New Collectivism’s tasks was to work with other clients in order to make money that the larger NSK collective could use.

This idea of self-economy was also part of this institutional building principle. In addition to The New Collectivism, NSK “state” started immediately working with the collectors. Their idea was that there was no art market in Slovenia, and the art market is very important in how it provides capital to artists to live and work with.

This institutional building was a very important part of their work. When we came together to collaborate, we shared the same interests about the internationalization of Slovene space and about collaborating with international partners that shared the same ideas. We aimed to do all of this within an Eastern European international context.

JY

You mentioned being influenced by coming of age in Yugoslavia before it dissolved. In America and throughout the West, we are facing what feels like some of the largest political shifts in generations. Having experienced collaborations with artists during large political and societal changes, I was curious if you have any recommendations on comradeship during unraveling times?

ZB

What is very important is to nourish authentic interest.

Recently, I was writing about this authentic interest, referring to Boltanski and Chiapello, who wrote about how capitalism capitalized on authenticity and sells the authentic cynically without really believing in its authenticity.

Authenticity should be somehow reinvented. “Authentic” is something maybe we can use today as a situated interest, an interest that comes from the needs of your own environment—the priorities and needs that you don’t see as isolated but are now always connected to other localities, because there is nothing isolated today. Authenticity should become more relational and situated. Recently, others, like some of my Spanish colleagues, use the term “situated” when they speak of their local museums. Additionally, feminist theories around situated positions are very important and can be related to other minority positions, including those of geography, such as the margins of Europe, Eastern Europe, and so on.

I think that all the margin positions should be related. When we think about ourselves coming from one of those margin positions, we need always to think about it in relation to other minor positions, and thus be able to globalize our ideas. This interest in socialism and comradeship that has been alive from the very beginning of my work is more or less the same, exploring a socialism that is about national or ethnic interests: The Internationale. The Confederation. This is the Workers’ Anthem.

The Workers’ Anthem thinks about the transnational. What the workers from different countries share [are] their class interests. It’s not a national or regional interest. We should think about our regional things, about Eastern Europe, always in relation to other particular interests. I wouldn’t say only regional interests or local interests, but also different minor positions.

JY

One of your collections of writings is titled Comradeship. After discussing your experiences working with with artists, curators, philosophers, and others, I was curious if you have any key learnings or ways of collaboratively working.

ZB

Actually, I think that I somehow developed a formula for comradeship. Comradeship is something that consisted of ideas, similar visions on one side, and effects. To quote the diary of Edvard Kocbek, the Slovene writer who wrote a diary during the partisan battles in the Second World War that shares the same title of Comradeship, “comrades should feel like a fish in water.”

Comradeship is a natural environment where you feel [for] your comrade and not only his idea. There are the goals, ideas, visions, and also the effects, such as someone being ready to die for freedom. There was also a specific socialist ethics of going beyond class, race, gender divisions. This is also very important for this definition of comradeship.

In my personal case, comradeship is also something related to my own history of formation in the time of Yugoslavia, socialism, and experiences of collaborating in the 1990s with the artist community in Ljubljana. It continued in 2010 when we initiated the European Confederation International, which today has become much bigger.

This idea of comradeship is still very much present.▪︎

Discover some of the artists and themes from this conversation in the exhibition Multiple Realities: Experimental Art in the Eastern Bloc, 1960s–1980s on view at the Walker from Nov 11, 2023–Mar 10, 2024.