Looking for YU

Speakers:

Dietmar Steiner, director Az W
Christine Böhler, director cultural programme ERSTE Foundation
Wolfgang Thaler, photographer

Lecture ‘Modernism in-between. Architecture in Socialist Yugoslavia’:

Vladimir Kulic, assistant professor, Florida Atlantic University, USA/Serbia
Maroje Mrduljaš, architecture critic and managing editor of Oris, Croatia

In collaboration with the architecture historians Maroje Mrduljaš and Vladimir Kulic, between 2008 and 2001 Wolfgang Thaler went in search of the architecture from the period of Socialism in the region of ex-Yugoslavia. The result is a comprehensive documentation of Yugoslavian architecture between 1948 and 1990, which is being published by Jovis Verlag in Summer 2012 under the title ‘Modernism In-Between: The Mediatory Architectures of Socialist Yugoslavia’. The project was shown at the series of Unfinished Modernization conferences in Zagreb, Beograd and Split, and then at the D-0 ARK UNDERGROUND Biennale in Konjic (BiH).

Wolfgang Thaler’s subtle and atmospheric images of buildings from the entire area of former-Yugoslavia provide, for the first time, a comprehensive survey of the fascinating and exceptional wealth of modern and postmodern architecture in the region. They show an architecture that has neither been previously researched nor presented in its entirety. The exhibition project reveals a surprisingly wide diversity of architectural languages that arose in a very heterogeneous cultural and geographic space. ‘Looking for YU’ provides insights into a Socialist society that no longer exists, and one whose achievement must be reappraised taking its unique architectural culture into consideration.

The event is being held in English and German

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