Jasmina Tumbas | “I Am Jugoslovenka!” Book Presentation
14 June 2022, 12 noon, Škuc Gallery
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You are kindly invited to attend the “I am Jugoslovenka” book presentation with Jasmina Tumbas in conversation with Suzana Tratnik on Tuesday, 14 June, at 12 noon at Škuc Gallery!
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“I Am Jugoslovenka!” Feminist Performance Politics During and After Yugoslav Socialism (Manchester University Press, 2022)
“I am Jugoslovenka” argues that queer feminist artistic and political resistance was paradoxically made possible by the unique history of patriarchy and women’s emancipation in socialist Yugoslavia. Spanning performance and conceptual art, video works, film and pop music, lesbian activism and press photos of female snipers in the Yugoslav wars, the book analyses feminist resistance in a series of performative actions that manifest the radical embodiment of Yugoslavia’s anti-fascist, transnational and feminist legacies. It covers celebrated and lesser-known artists from the 1970s to the present, including Marina Abramović, Sanja Iveković, Vlasta Delimar, Tanja Ostojić, Selma Selman and Helena Janečić, as well as music legends Lepa Brena and Esma Redžepova. “I am Jugoslovenka” tells a unique story of women’s resistance at the intersection of feminism, socialism and nationalism in the visual culture of Eastern Europe.
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*You will receive a 40% discount on Jasmina Tumbas’ book “I am Jugoslovenka!” Feminist Performance Politics During and After Yugoslav Socialism when you use the promo code JUGOSLOVENKA40 and order through the Manchester University Press website.
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Jasmina Tumbas (PhD, Art History, Duke University) is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art History and Performance Studies as well as Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University at Buffalo. Her first book, “I Am Jugoslovenka!” Feminist Performance Politics During and After Yugoslav Socialism was recently published in Manchester University Press’ Rethinking Art’s Histories series (February 2022). Tumbas is also working on a second manuscript, Feminists of the Yugoslav Diaspora: Art and Resistance Beyond Citizenship and Nationhood. She was guest editor for the special issue of ArtLeaks Gazette #5: Patriarchy Over and Out: Discourse Made Manifest. Her research has appeared in ArtMargins, Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, Art Monthly, Art in America, ASAP Journal, Art and Documentation, and in the anthologies Shifting Corporealities in Contemporary Performance (edited by Marina Gržinić and Aneta Stojnić) and Performance Art in the Second Public Sphere (edited by Katalin Cseh-Varga and Adam Czirak).
Suzana Tratnik received her BA in Sociology from the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana, and her MA in Gender Anthropology from the Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis. She is a writer, translator, sociologist, essayist and lesbian activist. Tratnik has published seven collections of short stories: Pod ničlo (Below Zero, 1997), Na svojem dvorišču (In One’s Own Backyard, 2003), Vzporednice (Parallels, 2005), Česa nisem nikoli razumela na vlaku (Things I’ve Never Understood on the Train, 2008), Dva svetova (Two Worlds, 2010), Rezervat (Reservation, 2012), and Noben glas (No Voice, 2016), five novels: Ime mi je Damjan (My Name is Damian, 2001), Tretji svet (Third World, 2007), Tombola ali življenje! (Bingo or Life!, 2017), Norhavs na vrhu hriba (Madhouse on the Hilltop, 2019) and The Pontoon Bridge (2020), a children’s picture book Zafuškana Ganca (The Hany Rattie, 2010), as well as the monodrama Ime mi je Damjan (My Name is Damian, 2002), the radio play Lep dan še naprej (Have a Nice Day, 2012), and two scientific works on the lesbian movement in Slovenia and on lesbian literature, as well as the memoir Lezbični aktivizem po korakih (Lesbian Activism in Steps, 2013). In 2007, Tratnik received the national Prešeren Fund Award for Literature. Her books and short stories have been translated into more than thirty languages. The two main themes of her fiction are the marginal destinies in contemporary urban life and presentations of childhood in Yugoslavia in the 1960s and 1970s.
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Book cover: Šejla Kamerić, Behind The Scenes I, 2019.
Photos of the event: Simao Bessa