A prestigious new exhibition forces a fresh look at the underappreciated architecture of Tito’s Yugoslavia.
An ugly, grey reflection of life under Communism, or a radical, forward-looking expression of an egalitarian utopia, built for the masses and not the privileged few?
Love it or hate it, the brutalist architectural heritage of socialist Yugoslavia has not fared well over the quarter of a century since the disintegration of the country that created it. Even some of its finest examples have been destroyed by design, neglect or the market forces of capitalism.
Now, a new exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, MoMA, hopes to inspire a reappraisal of Yugoslavia’s architectural legacy, its quality, innovation and devotion to social purpose.
Opening on July 15 and running until January 2019, Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980 promises to shine a light not only on the impressive and sometimes puzzling aesthetics of the period, but on the social, economic and geo-political context of some of its most iconic works.
The exhibition represents the first by a major museum dedicated solely to the architecture of socialist Yugoslavia. It is also the first undertaken by Martino Stierli, The Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at MoMA, since he took on the role in early 2015.
“I was fascinated by the richness, the abundance and the high quality of many of the things… that Yugoslavia produced in the post-war period, which I came to see as on equal par with anything that was built in the post-war period anywhere,” Stierli said at a press preview of the exhibition on July 10.
“Our project looks at a part of the world that because of Cold War politics was not seen the way it should have been seen.”
Derided ideas
Viewed from abroad, Yugoslav architecture suffers from its erroneous association with the Eastern bloc – poverty and squalor behind faceless, concrete monoliths.
It has been similarly underappreciated at home, forever tied in the minds of much of the post-Yugoslav elite to now-derided ideas of socialism, universalism, multi-ethnic harmony and, sadly, anti-fascism.
On an aesthetic level, brutalism is compared unfavourably with the bourgeois, pre-WWII era.
Even the Belgrade-born performance artist Marina Abramovic has described the city where she grew in the fifties and sixties as looking like “the leaders looked through the lens of someone else’s Communism and built something less good and less functional and more fucked up”.
For more read the full of article at The Balkaninsight
