Bojana Matejić1
Manipulating Memory and Mourning
in Post-socialist Art
Abstract: When it comes to global contemporary art practice, the
present-day humanitarian discourse abounds in a variety of self-ex-
planatory notions and imperatives such as: political art, commu-
nity-based art, post-studio practices, participatory art, contextual
art, socially engaged art, collaborative art, interactive art. It long
ago became apparent that artistic practice can no longer revolve
around producing objects for consumption by a passive audience,
but must take an active part in interfacing with social reality. In per-
ceiving the modality of a work of art and artistic practice, such a
change goes hand in hand with the post-Fordist economic changes
and the immaterial and flexible labour imperatives. Claire Bishop
has already extensively depicted such artistic phenomena in several
of her publications.
Since the early 90s, after the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, we
have been informed that we ought to be involved with the humanist
struggle for the ‘politics of human rights’, and for ‘Art against terror-
ism’, or engaged with social groups and minorities with the aim of
integrating them into a ‘legal sphere’ of life. The humanitarian/hu-
manist imperative, present in everyday political discourse, art and
culture, presupposes an opposition between good and evil, where art
as a human, humanist and humanitarian activity, is supposed to as-
sume a ‘responsible’ role. In the view of such rhetoric, Art must be
‘political’, ‘socially engaged’ and ‘participatory’, to the extent that it
23
Moni tor  ISH (2017), XIX/2, 23–48
Izvirni znanstveni članek
Original scientific article
1 Dr Bojana Matejić is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts at
the University of Arts in Belgrade. E-mail: bojanamatejic00@gmail.com.
02 - BojanaMatejic  23. 11. 2017  13:49  Page 23
indicates the sharp distinction between the places of violence and
those of justice. However, as Marx indicated so many times, the divi-
sion between those who have the right to be seen (the ‘polis’, or public
sphere) and those who do not have a right to a voice (private sphere),
assents to social division as such, as well as a rather contingent eth-
ical contraposition between good and evil. Humanitarianism/Hu-
manism in art only affirms the existing democratic phraseology. The
humanitarian/humanist regime of art validates a separation between
civil society and the abstract society of political equality. Therefore,
the aim of this paper is to trace the conceptual distinction between
the humanitarian ideology of the current time in the post-socialist
context of art and culture, and the thinking and practical application
of the concept of the dehumanisation of art.
The manuscript consists of three parts: In the first part, I will re-
call Adorno’s thesis regarding the ‘after-Auschwitz’ ethic of repre-
sentation; in the second part, I will discuss the controversy and the
implementation of this thesis following 9/11 as related to culture;
and finally, in the third part, I will address the issue of how this the-
sis, as the main current ideological weapon, conditions the contem-
porary state of affairs in the post-socialist spaces of art and culture,
by indicating several key symptoms in artistic production.
Keywords: humanitarianism, humanism, dehumanisation of art,
post-socialism, emancipation, 9/11
UDK 7:316.323.6
Manipulacija s spominom in žalovanjem v postsocialistični 
umetnosti
Izvleček: Ko govorimo o sodobni globalni umetniški praksi, je da-
našnji humanitarni diskurz poln široke palete samo po sebi razum-
ljivih pojmov in imperativov, kot so: politična umetnost, skupnostno
pogojena umetnost, post-studijske prakse, participativna umetnost,
Bojana Matejić
24
02 - BojanaMatejic  23. 11. 2017  13:49  Page 24
kontekstualna umetnost, družbeno angažirana umetnost, kolabora-
cionistična umetnost, interaktivna umetnost. Že dolgo nazaj je po-
stalo  očitno,  da  se  umetniška  praksa  ne  more  več  vrteti  okoli
produciranja  predmetov  za  potrošnjo  s  strani  pasivne  publike,
ampak mora zavzeti aktivno vlogo pri povezavi z družbeno real-
nostjo. Pri dojemanju modalitete umetniškega dela in umetniške
prakse gre takšna sprememba z roko v roki s post-Fordovskimi go-
spodarskimi spremembami in nematerialnimi ter fleksibilnimi de-
lavskimi imperativi. Claire Bishop je ta umetniški fenomen izčrpno
prikazala že v svojih številnih objavah.
Že vse od zgodnjih 90. let prejšnjega stoletja, po padcu železne
zavese leta 1989, smo obveščeni, da bi morali biti vključeni v hu-
manistični boj za ‘politiko človekovih pravic’ in v ‘Umetnost proti
terorizmu’, ali pa angažirani v družbenih skupinah in manjšinah s
ciljem integrirati jih v ‘pravno sfero’ življenja. Humanitarni/huma-
nistični imperativ, prisoten v vsakodnevnem političnem diskurzu,
umetnosti in kulturi, predvideva opozicijo dobrega in slabega, kjer
naj bi umetnost kot človeška, humanistična in humanitarna dejav-
nost prevzela ‘odgovorno’ vlogo. S takšno retoriko v mislih mora
biti Umetnost ‘politična’, ‘družbeno angažirana’ in ‘participativna’,
vse do te mere, da nakazuje strogo razliko med prostori nasilja in
tistimi pravice. Vendar pa, kot je tolikokrat nakazal Marx, razlika
med tistimi, ki imajo pravico biti videni (‘polis’ ali javna sfera), in
tistimi, ki nimajo pravice do glasu (zasebna sfera), pristaja na druž-
beno delitev kot takšno, pa tudi na dokaj odvisno etično nasprotje
med  dobrim  in  zlim.  Humanitarizem/humanizem  v  umetnosti
zgolj  potrjuje  obstoječo  demokratično  frazeologijo.
Humanitarni/humanistični  režim umetnosti  potrjuje  ločevanje
med civilno družbo in abstraktno družbo politične enakosti. Tako
je cilj tega prispevka slediti konceptualni razliki med humanitarno
ideologijo trenutnega časa v post-socialističnem kontekstu umet-
25
Manipulating Memory and Mourning in Post-socialist Art
02 - BojanaMatejic  23. 11. 2017  13:49  Page 25
nosti in kulture, pa tudi miselna in praktična aplikacija koncepta
dehumanizacije umetnosti.
Članek sestavljajo  trije deli: v prvem delu se avtorica spomni
Adornove teze o ‘post-Auschwitz’ etiki zastopanja; v drugem delu bo
govora o kontroverznosti in implementaciji te teze po 11. septembru
v povezavi s kulturo; na koncu pa v tretjem delu naslavlja problema-
tiko kako ta teza, kot trenutno glavno ideološko orožje, pogojuje se-
danje stanje v post-socialističnih prostorih umetnosti in kulture s
tem, da bo nakazala več ključnih simptomov v umetniški produkciji.
Ključne besede: humanitarizen, humanizem, dehumanizacija umet-
nosti, postsocializem, emancipacija, 11. september
0     0     0
Introduction
It has been twenty-seven years since the Fall of the Iron Curtain
and the promise of a new global post-political, post-ideological and
post-historical democratic era. Immediately after this historical mo-
ment, politics, art and culture in the Yugoslav context entered the
final stage of their disintegration, and instead of the former social-
democratic ideals of equality, fraternity and unity, there emerged
various nationalist imperatives and programmes under the um-
brella of ‘Western liberal democracy’. 
During the 90s, it seemed that avant-gardes in the (post-)so-
cialist Yugoslav spaces of art and culture were not dead: there ap-
peared various alternative, activist, dissident cultural movements
(although most of them were financed by cultural initiatives such
as the Soros Foundation)2, which strived to overcome the artistic,
Bojana Matejić
26
2 Šuvaković, 2002.
02 - BojanaMatejic  23. 11. 2017  13:49  Page 26
traditional, modernist, projective and utopian avant-garde’s en-
deavours. As a matter of fact, scrutiny of the modernist avant-
garde legitimacy commenced long before Yugoslavia collapsed
into its political and territorial disintegration: Between the early
70s and the 90s, some artistic practices such as Slovenian Neue
Slowenische Kunst (NSK) and Laibachkunst announced the de-
construction of state socialism and its transition into post-social-
ism on the ground of the avant-garde legacy.3 Net.art also marked
the two-fold property of access to technology such as (a)political-
ity  of  the  internet,  making  political  statements  and  gestures
whose goals were to attack norms of the (traditional) art estab-
lishment.4 With the postmodernist turn and the collapse of the
Eastern bloc, many artists in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe
addressed political issues regarding otherness from the feminist,
queer and postcolonial identity platforms.
What is most striking when it comes to ‘political’ or the so-called
‘socially engaged art practises’ in the last fifteen years, that I find ex-
tremely symptomatic in the post-socialist spaces of art and culture,
and which, in my opinion, have contributed to the neoliberal glob-
alising cultural industry—is an increasing focus on humanist/hu-
manitarian imperative of memory production and reception. It may
seem that many preoccupations of artists who work with memory,
nostalgia, Holocaust and specifically with Yugo-nostalgia, were to
be carried forward to the critique of the fascist logic that has been
survived and has been always (more or less) alive in the contempo-
rary consumer capitalist societies. However, what this kind of art
produces is something quite opposite. In the majority of the artistic
works of memory, trauma, nostalgia and reconciliation, an accent
27
Manipulating Memory and Mourning in Post-socialist Art
3 Erjavec, 2005, 7.
4 Greene, 2004, 52.
02 - BojanaMatejic  23. 11. 2017  13:49  Page 27
has been placed on the ‘data(base) aesthetics’5 and archival artistic
procedures from the moralising standpoint(s) that suffers from the
lack of serious research background and query. 
On the one hand, the opening towards new technologies (ITC),
and, on the other hand bloody wars and political conflicts from the
early 90s, enabled the artistic context of South-Eastern Europe to
become exquisitely the place of the postcolonial exoticisation, in
which the art of memory, trauma and nostalgia with the help of
‘memory studies’ as its main theoretical point of departure and ad-
vocation, have played a significant role. As Norman Finkelstein
noted, ‘The Holocaust has become “an indispensable ideological
weapon”6 in contemporary politics, art, and culture at large, that
justifies and acknowledges a doxa according to which ‘there is no
alternative’, and (what is most formidable) the procedure of victim-
isation of specific, minor group of people (in the USA particularly)
– by which certain privileging social relations and forces of produc-
tion, as well as their political pretensions – gain immunity to criti-
cism.  In  the  wake  of  Novicks’s  research,  Finkelstein  aimed  his
analysis at the properties and inflections of the so-called ‘Holo-
caust-industry’ claiming that, currently all  the rage  in the  ivory
tower, ‘memory’ is surely the most impoverished concept to come
down the academic pike in a long time (…) Today, all that remains
is the bland, depoliticised language of ‘concerns’ and ‘memory’.7
This cultural, political and economic phenomenon may be tracked
in the case of ‘after-Auschwitz’ cultural claim and its gradual ideolog-
ical distortion that became more perceptible after 9/11. In other words,
what I am trying to state is that the art of memory, remembrance,
Bojana Matejić
28
5 Cf. Bulajić, 2007, 3–22. Wilson, 2006.
6 Finkelstein, 2001, 10.
7 Ibid.
02 - BojanaMatejic  23. 11. 2017  13:49  Page 28
trauma and nostalgia represents one of the most powerful contempo-
rary political means for protecting and advocating certain class inter-
ests on the global level of the all-more social segregation. 
A few notes on the ‘after-Auschwitz’ dictum
I would like to begin this analysis with some of Adorno’s statements
regarding the ethic of the impossibility of art after Auschwitz:
1. Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the di-
alectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz
is barbaric.8
2. I do not want to soften my statement that after Auschwitz it is
barbaric to go on writing poetry; it expresses, negatively, the im-
pulse that animates committed literature. (…) The excess of real
suffering permits no forgetting.9
3. It is self-evident that nothing concerning art is self-evident any-
more, not its inner life, not its relation to the world, not even its
right to exist.10
4. The more the emancipation of the subject demolished every idea
of a pre-established order conferring meaning, the more dubious
the concept of meaning became as the refuge of a fading theol-
ogy. Even prior to Auschwitz it was an affirmative lie, given his-
torical experience, to ascribe any positive meaning to existence.11
5. In silence alone is the name of the catastrophe to be spoken . . .
But laments and complaints [Klage] about this must reflect—in
spirit—the fact that laments and complaints themselves are no
longer possible. No weeping melts the armour; the only face left
is the one whose tears have dried up. This lies at the basis of an
29
Manipulating Memory and Mourning in Post-socialist Art
8 Adorno, “Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft”; Adorno, 1981, 34.
9 Ray, 2005, cit. 65.
10 Adorno, 2013, 1.
11 Ibid. 208.
02 - BojanaMatejic  23. 11. 2017  13:49  Page 29
artistic method that is denounced as inhuman by those whose
humanity has already become an advertisement for inhumanity,
even if they are not aware of it.12
6. Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as one who
is tortured has to scream; thus it may have been wrong [to have
claimed] that after Auschwitz no more poems [kein Gedicht]
may be written.13
One could say that the common denominator of all these state-
ments rests upon the standpoint according to which Auschwitz was
the inexplicable betrayal of a culture’s traditional claim to ennoble and
improve humanity. In the light of this argument, Adorno advocated
the ‘double bind’ dimension of art towards artistic autonomy, rather
than an engaged art which accepts art’s instrumentalisation which pre-
supposes both autonomy and the fait social. The concept of the auton-
omy of art or of the negative representation of Auschwitz in Adorno’s
position implies, simply speaking, blocking the extraction of any aes-
thetic pleasure or redemptive meaning. Adorno’s ethics of representa-
tion – “the case of Auschwitz” – rests upon a resolution of the issue of
how we may proceed to live under the existing conditions of social bar-
barism in which the Enlightenment cultural programme has failed. It
would be barbarism after Auschwitz to reach back to these traditional
moralistic forms of art, on the one hand, and on the other, to subject
artistic practices to the moralistic rhetoric of every-day politics.14 
In  the  light of  this argument,  it  is worth mentioning one of
Adorno’s crucial examples: Schönberg’s The Survivors of Warsaw,
in relation to which he elucidates the issue on politicality and the
Bojana Matejić
30
12 Ibid.
13 Adorno, 1966; Adorno, 1995, 355/369.
14 Ray, 2005, 64.
02 - BojanaMatejic  23. 11. 2017  13:49  Page 30
ethical claims of art after Auschwitz. As an aporia of historical suf-
fering has been aesthetically transformed into a representation, the
victims are to be turned into a work of art. With this procedure, the
unthinkable becomes thinkable, thereby opening up the possibility
of a redeeming transfiguration.15
What it seems that Adorno tries to uphold is the thesis accord-
ing to which committed art approaches the social aporia too di-
rectly, producing positive – I would say, humanist/humanitarian
and moral – significations. 
The ‘After-Auschwitz’ ethical claim and its implications
in contemporary art after 9/11
Today one may witness the presence of the ‘after-Auschwitz’ ethic’s
claim on contemporary political art in a rather controversial manner,
especially to the extent it coincides with the recent historical crisis
following the demolition of the Iron Curtain, such as the September
11 attacks in 2001 (9/11). In the early 90s, it became apparent that
the ‘after-Auschwitz’ ethic had come to dominance and was being
gradually conventionalised. As a matter of fact, it seems that the
‘after-Auschwitz’ ethic of representation has been misinterpreted as
a consequence of the transitional historical conjunctures and of the
conditions of justification for the current democratic phraseology.
Deviation of the ‘after-Auschwitz’ standpoint goes hand in hand with
the weakening of the utopian social movements in major Western
countries and replacing the social struggles for real democracy with
the rules of the State of the Right. The result of such procedure be-
came obvious in the light of an argument which Rancière has al-
ready provided: the political has been withdrawn from the public
sphere in such manner that it has become indistinguishable from
31
Manipulating Memory and Mourning in Post-socialist Art
15 Ibid.
02 - BojanaMatejic  23. 11. 2017  13:49  Page 31
the (international) Law.16 At the core of the consensual harmony of
‘humanitarian discourse (of art)’ is the procedure of blurring the
boundaries between the factual dispositive (status quo) of the given
society  and  its  normative  and  legislative  underpinning.  Subse-
quently, this procedure produces a ‘reminder’—a multitude of indi-
viduals that fall outside of “this happy circle of fact and law”.17
The result is obvious: Each otherness deserves to be politically
seen and heard. Every minority should have the merit of being in-
cluded into the social regime of the visible – into the sphere of the
‘right to existence’. The manifestness of bodies and their desiring
and machinic life ought to be tracked and performed. Artists “can-
not write poetry”, because, after 9/11, “writing poetry is barbaric”.
The ‘barbaric communism’ of Cold War rhetoric has now been re-
placed with ‘Islamic terrorism’, justifying the humanitarian right to
intervention. ‘We’ should all ‘enunciate’, ‘declare’, ‘verbalise’, ‘speak’,
‘break silence’… about the Holocaust/Shoah, for such a Thing ‘will
never happen again’ as long as the contemptuously paternalistic
military intervention against the disobedient easterners proceeds.
One is not faced here only with the established conventions of so-
called ‘Holocaust Art’, but with the ideological nucleus that pertains
to the contemporary demand for art’s political, moral commitment and
its humanitarian and humanist discourse. Gene Ray well noted that:
…although the limits Adorno imposed were a critical response
to new historical conditions after 1945, the rigidification of those
limits into a set of blindly followed formulas obscures their own
historical specificity and makes it more difficult to test them
against the shifting realities of new contemporary conditions.18
Bojana Matejić
32
16 Rancière, 2010, 101.
17 Ibid. 102.
18 Ray, 2005, 68.
02 - BojanaMatejic  23. 11. 2017  13:49  Page 32
The ‘after-Auschwitz’ ethic of representation has, in the process
of its reception, undergone ideological transformation when com-
pared to  its original  formulation. The fear of  the  ’concentration
camp’  has  proven  to  be  one  of  the  most  efficient  ideological
weapons of contemporaneity. The survival of the fascist logic in
consumer capitalism is to be found in the current representational
taboos, moralistic imagery and humanitarian and humanist visual
rhetoric. The dominance of the ‘after-Auschwitz’ dictum goes hand
in hand with the US-led “War on Terror” and the reinforcement of
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict just after 9/11—after ‘We’ were all in-
formed that we should be struggling against Islamic terrorism. The
word ‘terrorist’ has gradually become an inherently propagandistic
term in the everyday political speech that pertains to traditional En-
lightenment moralist formalism. 
By establishing the place of the so-called ‘Terror’, the propo-
nents of the current democratic phraseology lay claim to a human-
itarian/humanist and moralist discourse of culture, which reflects
itself in the soft totalitarianism of the mass consumer democratic so-
cieties and the global government of capital. The humanitarian/hu-
manist logic of art justifies the current positive idea of humanity,
that is to say, of ‘human rights’, which stands in accord with the Law
that regulates judgements and opinions concerning the Evil that
happens in some variable elsewhere. As Badiou maintained:
Ethics is thus part of what prohibits any idea, any coherent proj-
ect of thought, settling instead for overlaying unthought and
anonymous situations with mere humanitarian prattle (…)19
The  current  humanitarian/humanist  ethical  consensus,  for
which ‘after-Auschwitz’ rhetoric stands, has been founded on the a
33
Manipulating Memory and Mourning in Post-socialist Art
19 Badiou, 2001, 32.
02 - BojanaMatejic  23. 11. 2017  13:49  Page 33
priori recognition and determination of the Evil, and aims at the
mobilisation of people, opinion and cultural practices around a pos-
itive idea of the Good. The “after-Auschwitz” ethical claim in the
much changed circumstances after 9/11 reduces ethical issues to
the self-evident principles of human rights and humanitarian ac-
tions. Such transformation and misinterpretation of Adorno’s ‘after-
Auschwitz’ dictum leads to the definition of (wo)man as victim.
Respectively, in the contemporary global cultural circumstances,
the artistic ideological principle is reflected in the imperatives of
representation of the absolute victim of infinite Evil, which obliges
infinite retribution. Ethics, thus, has become a means to identify
and conceive of infinite Evil, laying claim to the constitution of an
absolute, extra-juridical right to the victim. Two main nucleuses
around which this dispositive knits the contemporary ideological
marvellous web are 1) The ideal of Good which eliminates political
dispute by blurring the boundaries between right and fact (of ways
of being and values); 2) Absolute Evil that requires the imperative
of representing a (wo)man as a victim.
The case of the post-socialist art world
In the post-socialist spaces of art and culture, such an ethic can be
recognised, especially to the extent that the historical promise of
socialism in the last two decades of the 20th century proved to be a
failure. Although the term ‘postsocialism’ in art, generally speaking,
refers to the common conditions of late socialism or postsocialism
which shaped artistic practices from the early 70s, early or late 80s
and early 90s20, I use this term more broadly, which is to say, in
order to mark the political, social and economic circumstances of
the global neoliberal restoration of the class system and traditional
Bojana Matejić
34
20 Erjavec, 2003, 337.
02 - BojanaMatejic  23. 11. 2017  13:49  Page 34
values of the former socialist countries that influenced the shaping
of artistic production.21 The term ‘post-socialist’ in my own nomen-
clature  also  refers  to  the  process  of  specific  contextualisation,
fetishisation and political exoticising of the cultural production in
the “barbaric” and “traumatised” political geographies of the former
socialist and communist countries. It functions as a convenient
label for the “specific” contemporary artistic practices, that have
been recognised by the rules and regulations of the contemporary
global market economy as something “naturally” inherent to the
presupposed political geography.
The  ‘after  Auschwitz’  ethical  consensus  in  the  post-socialist
spaces of art and culture is rooted in the sophistry according to which
every revolutionary project necessarily turns into a totalitarian night-
mare. ‘We’ have been convinced over the last fifteen years that every
attempt to inscribe an idea of justice and equality turns into Evil. The
ethical demand is clear: ‘communicate’, ‘politicise’, ‘make visible’, ‘ver-
balise’, ‘participate’… —the sharp distinction between the places of vi-
olence and those of justice must be verified. From the early 90s,‘’we’
were all to break silence about the crimes in the Balkans and make
otherness  visible—which,  under  this  supposition,  had  not  been
granted the right to any kind of an existence under the previous to-
talitarian regime. According to such a claim, all true emancipatory
art must be “politically” and “ethically” engaged. 
The moral, humanitarian nexus of the majority of such practices
is based on the afore-mentioned ethical humanitarian dictum at the
35
Manipulating Memory and Mourning in Post-socialist Art
21 I would like to stress that I do not consider the Yugoslav ‘socialist space
of art and culture’ as an innocent area of that what was or should be the
righteous and justifiable opponent to the Western capitalist consumerism
in any mean possible. When it comes to Yugoslavia, the ideals of the self-
management market system failed, and the result was a consolidation of
the so-called ‘economic statism’. 
02 - BojanaMatejic  23. 11. 2017  13:49  Page 35
intersection with the local narrative of the given political geogra-
phy. As I have pointed out elsewhere22, in the contemporary post-
socialist constellation of art, which nevertheless assigns to itself
the attribute of political emancipation, one can recognise mutually
related, key moments:
Fetishisation of art of memory, trauma and nostalgia
The concept of the art of memory, trauma and of nostalgia inclines
to that which is today, in a most popular manner, termed the ‘culture
of remembrance’. This specific artistic activity mostly takes the form
of recycling the existing texts and data from the field of broader cul-
ture in the manner of postmodern pastiche. Collecting, appropriating,
getting, retrieving, finding of data, information, and cultural texts in
the broader sense of the term, appears to be a self-sufficient play with
historical illusions. Practices of this kind are structured around cer-
tain historical, cultural and aesthetical patterns, myths and stereo-
types linked to the past, that stipulate the postcolonial exoticising of
the (post-)socialist spaces of art and culture. 
The issue of nostalgia was problematised even twenty-five years
earlier in the context of the cultural production conditioned by ‘late
capitalism’. Fredric Jameson, an emblematic figure on the Marxist
theoretical polygon, provided an elusive account on this matter.
Jameson made his critique of the postmodernist logic, especially
when discussing nostalgia film (la mode rétro), claiming that the
imperative of nostalgia in the postmodernist cultural production
Bojana Matejić
36
22 Matejić, 2014, 42–56. In this manuscript, I introduced the broader typol-
ogy of artistic practices in the post-socialist spaces of art and culture that
contribute to the reproduction of the existing power relations. The focus
of my attention here is only a memory discourse of art and culture and its
humanitarian/humanist logic.
02 - BojanaMatejic  23. 11. 2017  13:49  Page 36
implies “a depersonalised visual curiosity”23 in which “intertextu-
ality” is applied as 
a deliberate, built-in feature of the aesthetic effect and as the op-
erator of a new connotation of “pastness” and pseudohistorical
depth, in which the history of aesthetic styles displaces “real”
history.24
A memory, as a set of imagery constructions of the past or his-
torical ruptures/traumas, and nostalgia in the postmodern logic of
the cultural production, whose logical deviations are still present
today, colonises the “present”, by which historicism appears as a
substitute for “real” history. 
Notwithstanding, Linda Hutcheon elaborated a different ac-
count on the politics of postmodernism as related to nostalgia / re-
membering, addressing the issue of the constant critique of the
postmodernist ahistoricim. She stated that most of these critiques
of the postmodernist nostalgia were focused on the postmodernist
“naive” and “nostalgic” recycling of history. In Hutcheon’s perspec-
tive, what appears to be naive is the unquestionable belief that any
recall of the past must, by definition, be sentimental nostalgia. Post-
modernist usage of the past, says Hutcheon, does not include the
mechanisms of quotation of history with the aim of the transcen-
dental utopian projecting it into future. According to such claim, it
might be said that the traces of the postmodernist nostalgia in the
contemporary post-socialist spaces of art and culture do not imply
a search for transcendent timeless meaning, yet rather an evocation
of “a dialogue with the past in the light of the present”.25
37
Manipulating Memory and Mourning in Post-socialist Art
23 Jameson, 1991, xvi.
24 Ibid., 19.
25 Hutcheon, 2003, 19.
02 - BojanaMatejic  23. 11. 2017  13:49  Page 37
What I am trying to indicate here by juxtaposing two opposing
discourses on postmodernist logic is that ‘postmodernist art’, in
such explanation—that  I share with Hutcheon  to some extent—
wields its subversive dimension in its specific historical and geopo-
litical constellation(s). However, most of the postmodernist tactics
are to be soon appropriated by the contemporary global power re-
lations becoming a mainstream. What is most exploited today from
the postmodernist strategies are artistic formal procedures such as
appropriation, citation, nostalgia (howbeit, here “bad” nostalgia)
and memory. 
Taking into account this difference, by the memory discourse of
the post-socialist art and culture I do not presuppose the postmod-
ernist  post-avant-garde  /  retro-avant-garde,  or  the  post-Soviet
anachronic painting etc. which problematise and deconstruct the
great historical metanarratives in accordance with the postmod-
ernist logic and cease to announce the political riots and conflicts
immediately around the Fall of the Iron Curtain. By the memory
discourse of the post-socialist art and culture, I imply the relatively
recent symptomatic phenomenon that appeared in the work of the
(predominantly) younger generation of artist and art theorists of
addressing topics such as the communist and socialist past, the
repercussions of the wars in the Balkans, partisan legacy, transfor-
mation of urban life in the changed political and economic circum-
stances  after  1989  from  the  moralising,  humanist  and  memory
discourse’s standpoints.
Let me dwell more on this problematic. The memory discourse
includes a broad corpus of texts and things—from the (contempo-
rary) museum procedures and regulations of collecting, archiving,
managing, allocating, representing and distributing of knowledge
(as the ‘legal’ battle over repressed memory) to the market for cul-
tural production, artistic works, academic books and articles that
Bojana Matejić
38
02 - BojanaMatejic  23. 11. 2017  13:49  Page 38
refer to memory as key word—that all together create and partici-
pate in the so-called ‘memory industry’.26 The academic interest
and fascination with the memory discourse is a quite new phenom-
enon. The concept of ‘collective memory’ appeared as an object of
scholarly enquiry in the early twentieth century with the first seri-
ous ‘crisis of historicism’. 
The term “collective memory” in the ‘culture of remembrance’
nomenclature was first used by Hugo Hofmannsthal, while Maurice
Halbwachs regards memory, contrary to H. Bergson and S. Freud,
as a specifically social phenomenon in his book The Social Frame-
work of Memory (1925). However, what is most striking is that the
academic and cultural interest in memory studies has grown with
the postmodernist dominance in the 80s, especially with the emer-
gence of two books: Yosef Yerushalmi’s Zakohor: Jewish History
and Jewish Memory (1982) and Pierre Nora’s “Between Memory
and History” the introduction to an anthology Lieux de mémoire
(1984). In these manuscripts, memory is regarded as a “primitive or
sacred form of accessing the past that is opposed to modern histor-
ical consciousness”. For Yerushalmi, the Jews were the archetypal
people of memory who had adopted history only recently and then
only in part, for ‘modern Jewish historiography can never replace
an eroded group memory’. For Nora, memory was an archaic mode
of being that had been devastated by rationalisation: ’We speak so
much of memory because there is so little of it left”.27
The logical justification of the indispensable conceptualisation
of memory,  in  the wake of postmodernism —as something that,
under  the  supposition,  confronts  (‘Western’)  aspiring  to  meta-
physics and historical grand metanarratives—rests upon humanist
39
Manipulating Memory and Mourning in Post-socialist Art
26 Kerwin, 2000, 127.
27 Ibid.
02 - BojanaMatejic  23. 11. 2017  13:49  Page 39
/ human and moralising belief that the process of ‘memorising’ will
necessarily prevent from the (radical) Evil / Holocaust (to ever hap-
pen again). All the more, some proponents believe that the ‘memory
discourse’ has a political dimension to the extent it takes a critical
stance towards the fascist consumer logic of (contemporary) capi-
talism. Unfortunately, to recall briefly Hannah Arendt’s seminal
manuscript, a (radical) Evil has nothing to do with the exception of
sadism, perversity, totalitarianism, community, brotherhood, soli-
darity, unity, socialism, communism, partisans, capitalism, history,
metaphysics (whatever word or label used), yet with the humanist,
moralising “terrifying normality” as such.28 Right here, one may re-
mark all the fine curtains of the humanitarian/humanist ideological
anamorphosis of the ‘after-Auschwitz’ ethical dictum. 
During the 90s in the post-Yugoslav spaces of art and culture—
socialism, communism, socialist modernism, self-management, par-
tisan  legacy etc. appeared  to be  indecent words. Only after  the
beginning of new century, the memory discourse—which includes
artistic imagery reinvention of the traces of either the “barbaric”
and/or “golden era” of the communist/socialist past, as well as the
implications of the process of vanishing of the socialist/communist
culture under the changed socio-political and economic circum-
stances—was enabled to be brought into light. As it was assured
that (state) communism/socialism (both in political life and cul-
ture) would not survive, that it was completely defunct and that it
no longer represented a threat to the neoliberal democratic ideals,
the memory discourse of the post-Yugoslav / post-socialist (or of
the recuperations of the war) cultural production was finally “al-
lowed” to exist, only if  it  is to be exploited by the new imperial
regimes of power. 
Bojana Matejić
40
28 Arendt, 1963/2006, 276.
02 - BojanaMatejic  23. 11. 2017  13:49  Page 40
Consider some of the examples of the (particularly) younger gen-
erations of artists: Relying on some visual patterns of (post-)concep-
tual art, Vladimir Milanović—the author of the exhibition Invisible
violence (2014) at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade, de-
claratively addresses the issues of the post-war trauma of the former
Yugoslav societies, as well as the questions of how the media and
the institutions in the post-Yugoslav societies “create public sphere”
and “collective memory”.29 This project, to some extent, stems from
the broader project “Četiri lica Omarske” initiated by artist Milica
Tomić. The exhibition launches an avalanche of serious questions:
from the visual aspects and methodology of the work as related to
its conceptual principles and the framework to the moralising stand-
point  typical  for  the  humanitarian/humanist  discourse.  Among
many, one imperative is imposed: We are all obliged to speak, enun-
ciate, declare, make visible, face etc. “our/Serbian/German… guilt”
for the Terror. Take another “young” example—Benjocki’s sound in-
stallation made of recordings and archival material of the Interna-
tional Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) titled
Soundtrack (Statements of Guilt) exhibited at the Royal Academy of
Arts in the Hague in 2011. The author produced a piece of music
from the previously archived, recorded, transcribed and translated
voices and statements of guilt. The work addresses the “reciprocal
alienation of voice and body from words and their context, and their
complex relationship with to how the trauma experienced in the
countries of the former Yugoslavia and the Netherlands is articu-
lated.”30 These works of art rather exemplify that of what Benjamin
called a(n)aestheticisation of politics31 of the existing humanitarian
41
Manipulating Memory and Mourning in Post-socialist Art
29 Cf. http://vladimirmiladinovic.blogspot.rs/.
30 Cf. http://www.kristinabenjocki.com/soundtrack-statements-guilt.
31 Benjamin, 2008, 41. Cf. Martin, 1992, 21.
02 - BojanaMatejic  23. 11. 2017  13:49  Page 41
democratic materialism32 / ‘after-Auschwitz’ ethical demand. The
aesthetical conception of memorising, remembrance and personal
enunciation here stand for the process of “normalising” of some-
thing which can never be symbolised—something which is at the
core of the “normality” per se. 
An artistic act of mourning
The second symptom that I find dominant in the last fifteen years
in the work of a younger generation of artist / theorist is an artistic
act of mourning.
The concept of an artistic act of mourning implies artistic prac-
tices that address the exotic mourning of the vanishing of the so-
cialist and communist aesthetic and historical legacies, such as
partisan history and  the  collapse and/or  lost utopia  (dystopia).
More precisely, the act of mourning in art privileges lost object of
desire which had implied some social values in the former socialist
and communist countries. What it seems here is the major focus of
the issue, is, actually, the act of mourning for the loss of the eman-
cipatory projective object of the great modernist utopias—which
testified to even before Auschwitz.33 Yet, that of what is missing is
nothing other than the “memory of deep memory”.
What is enacted is nostalgia for nostalgia, for the grand older
extinct questions of origin and telos, of deep time and the Freudian
Unconscious (…) for the dialectic also, as well as all the monumental
forms left high and dry by the ebb tide of the modern moment,
forms whose Absolutes are no longer audible to us, illegible hiero-
glyphs of the demiurgic within the technocratic world.34
Bojana Matejić
42
32 Badiou, 2016.
33 Horkheimer, Adorno, 2006.
34 Jameson, 1991, 155.
02 - BojanaMatejic  23. 11. 2017  13:49  Page 42
One should take into consideration, as Domenic Boyer stated, that
the nostalgia production is never neutral or innocent when consid-
ering the system and categories of valuation. Similar to history con-
struction, it is a narrative which is selected however legitimised,
since it comes “from above” (personal/social vs. history/state). Fur-
thermore, one should not neglect a discrepancy between the ‘indus-
try of nostalgia’  and  the  ‘culture of nostalgia’  as  remarks Mitja
Velikonja, since the former implies the exploitation of the culture
whose main resources are sentiments and emotions.35
Let me take an example: Tanja Deman’s and Vesna Jovanović’s
collaborative project Deserted Utopia (artist book, 2010) reflects on
examples in architecture and urban planning whose utopian “goal”
was emancipation of the modern Yugoslav society in the light of
aspiring to social values of ‘unity’, community etc., as that which
today represents a sign of a vanishing (either “golden” or ”shame-
ful”) socialist past. Similar Yugo-nostalgic reflections and outcomes
are suggested in Marta Popivoda’s film How Ideology Moved Our
Collective Body—a work in which the author seeks to make (media)
information, often lost or displaced, physically present, using the
methodology of archival samplings, juxtapositing the media con-
structions of the life form(s) in the socialist past and the 90s, that
marked  the  collapse of Yugoslavia.  Ivan Fijolić  cites  the visual
stereotypes and constructions of the socialist realism in the work
NEO N.O.B – The (Un-)popular Culture of Remembrance in  the
manner of the postmodernist pastiche and transfigures the visual
narrative by incorporation of the elements of pop culture. In the in-
stallation Here Come the Women (2015) Adela Jusić in collaboration
with Andreja Dugandžić produces monumental collages as the ci-
tation of the evident visual markers and traces from the media con-
43
Manipulating Memory and Mourning in Post-socialist Art
35 Popović, Belić, 2014, 94, 25.
02 - BojanaMatejic  23. 11. 2017  13:49  Page 43
structions of the woman’s social life under the Yugoslav socialist
regime. The installation problematises that of what could/might
socialism and/or equality claim mean for the “average” woman.
Similar topics and issues are initiated in the work Born without a
Reason: The Internal Soliloquy in Personal Encounter with Heroines
(2011) by Milica Rakič etc.
Most of these artistic practices, more or less, tend to use ‘Yugo-
nostalgia’ as the artistic act of mourning aspiring to political and
critical reflections on the current crisis of democracy and neoliber-
alism. Among other aims, they tend to reflect on the object that
could/might be realised, but in the end failed. However, what is
overseen in this relatively new cultural phenomenon is that they
push the contemporary neoliberal commodification of the ‘post-so-
cialist context of art’ to the extreme, by preserving the position of
the object for victimisation, exotification and humanitarian ideo-
logical anamorphosis.
Conclusion
At the end, I must stress that the aim of this manuscript was not to
render the listed artistic works as politically insignificant in the cur-
rent state of the post-socialist art and culture—or worse to claim
that such artistic practices should not exist—yet to open a dispute
for the identification and critical reflection of the new, quite fash-
ionable tendency of the (younger generation) artist/theorist who
comes (geographically) from the post-Yugoslav context. The rea-
sons for this situation should be found in the institutional disposi-
tive (art schools and master programmes) in (Western) Europe that
create and shape this global demand on the one hand, and on the
other—the global market economy which rests upon the procedures
of categorisation, separation and recognition, specifically inherent
in the given culture/geopolitics.
Bojana Matejić
44
02 - BojanaMatejic  23. 11. 2017  13:49  Page 44
Distortion of the ‘after-Auschwitz’ ethical dictum especially after
9/11 became one of the most powerful imperative as regards arts
and culture in which memory discourse plays the most significant
role. The art of memory, trauma and nostalgia contributes to the re-
cent restoration of the classical liberal bourgeois society values
(equality, civil rights, free speech, open media, humanitarianism,
etc.) resting upon the production of the “degraded repository of im-
ages and simulacra”36, in such a way that they substitute and reify
the stereotypical constructions for filling the gap between reality
and the past itself. 
Therefore, today inasmuch as, Hanno Rauterberg37 says, contem-
porary art is finally “free” from the categories of the form, technic
and visual, perceptible aspects of the modernist achievements, the
issue  of  its  function,  its  forms of  political,  economic  and  social
“value” / agency, its modes of shaping one’s/social life, become more
important. In the present dominant humanist/humanitarian circum-
stances, one should try to think and practically indicate the possi-
bilities of the process of the dehumanisation of art—of the moments
of refusal that exceed the current culture’s affirmative social func-
tions. As the humanitarian imperative of a/Art calls for obedience
to some supposed Good against Evil, for which it is assumed cultural
workers must strive, an art that aspires to emancipation might start
by  recognising  the dominant  images and spectacularisations of
democratic phraseology critically demonstrating this very process
of recognition. All these moments of post-socialist artistic practices
that I have just identified, more or less acknowledge, fortify and con-
solidate the current ‘fear of Terror’ and ideological anamorphosis of
the ‘after-Auschwitz’ ethic of representation.
45
Manipulating Memory and Mourning in Post-socialist Art
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37 Rauterberg, 2016, 8.
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