Ivana Marjanovic

Artistic/cultural disobedience

Ivana Marjanović’s research project at Büchsenhausen focused on the interrelation of cultural/artistic production and the political, and possibilities for the intersection between the two.

Her research put the space of the former Yugoslavia—Serbia, to be precise—and post-1989 Europe into focus. Marjanovic’s project started from an investigation of the work of local/transnational collectives such as Queer Beograd and Biro Beograd. In analyzing these practices, she examined the critique of nationalism, the conservatism of the post-communist transitional countries and the neo-colonial reality of Eastern Europe. It also focused on the denaturalization processes of these social formations, social disobedience, contra-conduct, social struggles and art/cultural struggles, spaces of alliances and transnational collaboration. Artistic/Cultural Disobedience not only aimed to critique the hegemonic order through analysis of the manifestations of power relations; it sought to destabilize it by examining the activities of specific art and cultural actors and their interventionist work, which—along with other actors—organized the space on the basis of interactive and conflicted relationships.

The project aimed to show that what is intended can actually not be entirely governed, controlled and hegemonized. Spaces of struggle and contestation, i.e., spaces in between, were engendered not as absolute externalities but as internal interventional horizons that produced tension in existing social structures. In that respect, the art field is not an unshaken space of monitoring, meant to reproduce ideology, but a social space of negotiation in which both play a role: mainstream institutions and artistic and cultural producers that disobey and reformulate art. In that sense, the practices and narratives of counter-conducts develop in correlation with national, European and global governmentality.
(Text source: Ivana Marjanović)

Ivana Marjanović presented her work and working methods at the seminar Literary Theories—Public/s at the Institute of Languages and Literatures, Department of Comparative Literature, University of Innsbruck, which took place in the summer semester 2012, under the direction of Julia Prager.

In 2011, Ivana Marjanović was awarded the Stipend of the City of Innsbruck at Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen.