Naslov
Reviving the Memory: Memorial Sculpture as the Motif in the Art Practice of Igor Grubić

Autori
Horvatinčić, Sanja

Vrsta, podvrsta i kategorija rada
Sažeci sa skupova, sažetak, znanstveni

Skup
Between democracies 1989-2014: Remembering, narrating and reimagining the past in Eastern and Central Europe and South Africa

Mjesto i datum
Johannesburg, Južnoafrička Republika, 13.03.2015. - 15.03.2015

Vrsta sudjelovanja
Predavanje

Vrsta recenzije
Međunarodna recenzija

Ključne riječi
Igor Gubić; WWII memorial sculpture; post-socialist memory; abstraction; realism; activism

Sažetak
After the dissolution of the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, memory politics of all of its former member states underwent radical revision and transformation. Although the newly formed nation state used different and often conflictingmechanisms, narratives, criteria and dynamics, the key ideological agenda behind all of these processes was the formation and/or strengthening of exclusive national sentiments. They were accompanied by defamation of the main pillars of the former social, political and economic system, one of them being the belief in the unity of different nations and ethnicities achieved during the joint antifascist struggle organized by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia during the WWII. One of the consequences of these processes was the complete or partial destruction of thousands of memorials dedicated to the socialist revolution and the events and protagonists of the antifascist struggle during the recent national and ethnic conflicts of the early 1990s. This was reflected in the erasure and/or negligence of collective memory to antifascism as a positive social value, causing a long-term and still present crisis of memory politics in Croatia. Only recently did the public meaning these memorials – historical, art-historical, anthropological, and political – become legitimate subject of public discourse, while their social reaffirmation has primarily been advocated through NGOs’ initiatives and artists’ projects. The paper will focus on two recent works by Croatian multimedia and performance artist Igor Grubić (Zagreb, 1969) evolving around the same central motif – various types and forms of memorial sculpture dedicated to the WWII antifascist resistance – in order to agitate and/or question individual and collective responsibility to positive legacy of the otherwise stigmatized period of history. We shall analyze the use of different artistic strategies of Grubić’s reinterpretation of memorial sculpture as the media of collective memory: from transparent, temporary interventions to urban memorial sculpture (2008), to the poetic visual reinterpretation of ruined and/or neglected memorial objects placed in natural landscapes, opening thus the question of the ability of contemporary observer to (re)associate the modernist idea of universal and metaphysical quality of these sculptures with their strong collective and ideological implications.

Izvorni jezik
Engleski

Znanstvena područja
Povijest, Povijest umjetnosti, Etnologija i antropologija

POVEZANOST RADA