{"id":1243,"date":"1978-10-27T15:53:56","date_gmt":"1978-10-27T15:53:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tranzit.org\/?p=1243"},"modified":"2022-01-04T11:55:04","modified_gmt":"2022-01-04T11:55:04","slug":"the-conference-comrade-woman-art-program","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tranzit.org\/exhibitionarchive\/the-conference-comrade-woman-art-program\/","title":{"rendered":"The Conference Comrade Woman \u2013 Art Program (On Marxism and Feminism and Their Mutual Political Discontents)"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"The<\/a>
1\/18<\/span>The Conference \"Comrade Woman\" \u2013 Art Program, SKC Gallery, exhibition by Goranka Mati\u0107 and Neboj\u0161a \u010cankovi\u0107<\/div><\/div>
\"The<\/a>
1\/18<\/span>The Conference \"Comrade Woman\" \u2013 Art Program, SKC Gallery, exhibition by Goranka Mati\u0107 and Neboj\u0161a \u010cankovi<\/div><\/div>
\"The<\/a>
1\/18<\/span>The Conference \"Comrade Woman\" \u2013 Art Program, SKC Gallery, exhibition by Goranka Mati\u0107 and Neboj\u0161a \u010cankovi<\/div><\/div>
\"The<\/a>
1\/18<\/span>The Conference \"Comrade Woman\" \u2013 Art Program, SKC Gallery, exhibition by Goranka Mati\u0107 and Neboj\u0161a \u010cankovi<\/div><\/div>
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1\/18<\/span>The conference \"Comrade Woman\", SKC, Belgrade, 1978<\/div><\/div>
\"The<\/a>
1\/18<\/span>The conference \"Comrade Woman\", SKC, Belgrade, 1978<\/div><\/div>
\"The<\/a>
1\/18<\/span>The conference \"Comrade Woman\", SKC, Belgrade, 1978<\/div><\/div>
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1\/18<\/span>The conference \"Comrade Woman\", SKC, Belgrade, 1978<\/div><\/div>
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1\/18<\/span>The conference \"Comrade Woman\", SKC, Belgrade, 1978<\/div><\/div>
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1\/18<\/span>The conference \"Comrade Woman\", SKC, Belgrade, 1978<\/div><\/div>
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1\/18<\/span>The conference \"Comrade Woman\", SKC, Belgrade, 1978<\/div><\/div>
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1\/18<\/span>The conference \"Comrade Woman\", SKC, Belgrade, 1978<\/div><\/div>
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1\/18<\/span>The conference \"Comrade Woman\", SKC, Belgrade, 1978<\/div><\/div>
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1\/18<\/span>The conference \"Comrade Woman\", SKC, Belgrade, 1978<\/div><\/div>
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1\/18<\/span>The conference -Comrade Woman, SKC, 1978-23<\/div><\/div>
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1\/18<\/span>The conference \"Comrade Woman\", SKC, Belgrade, 1978<\/div><\/div>
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1\/18<\/span>The conference \"Comrade Woman\", SKC, Belgrade, 1978<\/div><\/div>
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1\/18<\/span>The conference \"Comrade Woman\", SKC, Belgrade, 1978<\/div><\/div><\/div>\n

The international conference Comrade Woman: Women\u2019s Question \u2013 A New Approach?<\/em> (Drug-ca \u017dena: \u017densko Pitanje \u2013 Novi Pristup?<\/em>) took place at the Student Cultural Centre (SKC), Belgrade, in 1978. It was the first autonomous second-wave feminist meeting in former Yugoslavia, and beyond\u2014the first conference of this kind initiated in non-Western-European context, and in a socialist country. Comrade Woman<\/em> gathered a number of significant feminist theorists and artists from both sides of \u201cthe curtain,\u201d and especially from various different cities in Yugoslavia. The discussions that took place in the different venues and spaces of SKC were accompanied by a thematic art program of exhibitions, films, and video-art screenings.<\/p>\n

The event was initiated by \u017darana Papi\u0107, a young feminist and anthropologist from Belgrade, who curated the conference program in collaboration with Dunja Bla\u017eevi\u0107 (who was then the director of SKC), and was predominantly focused on social-political issues. The panel discussions were developed in three thematic threads: 1) women, capitalism, social change; 2) women\u2019s culture; 3) women, capitalism, revolution.<\/p>\n

The closing session called Position(s) of Woman in the Self-managed Socialist Society<\/em> was dedicated to specific local issues and feminist struggles in the Yugoslav political context. According to the recollections of participants, the initiation of the conference was also attributed to several academic intellectuals who were colleagues of Papi\u0107: Nada Ler-Soforni\u0107, Vesna Pusi\u0107, Lidija Sklevicki, and Rada Ivekovi\u0107.<\/p>\n

The visual arts program that accompanied the conference was curated by Biljana Tomi\u0107 (who was head of the SKC gallery at the time) and Dunja Bla\u017eevi\u0107, with the assistance of a younger art historian Bojana Peji\u0107. Before Comrade Woman<\/em>, the only artistic event taking place in SKC that could be explicitly designated as feminist was the discussion Women in Art<\/em>,[1]<\/a> organized within the fourth edition of April Meetings \u2013 The Festival of Extended Media <\/em>in 1975 (the year was celebrated as the International Year of Women <\/em>worldwide).[2]<\/a><\/p>\n

The exhibition program included two documentary displays. One was The Yugoslav Woman in Statistics<\/em> (Jugoslovenska \u017eena u statistici<\/em>), conceptualized through the selection of different data \u201cportraying\u201d the position of women in Yugoslavia; interestingly enough, the data was collected from official state media, such as the annual statistics report (Statisti\u010dki godi\u0161njak<\/em>) and the similarly titled publication A Woman in Statistics of Yugoslavia<\/em> (\u017dena u statistici Jugoslavije<\/em>), published by the state organization called the Conference for Social Activity of Women (Konferencija za dru\u0161tvenu aktivnost \u017eena)\u2014the main organ of the party for discussing women\u2019s issues in the official political context. Another documentary display was presented under the title The Sexism That Surrounds Us<\/em> (Seksizam oko nas<\/em>), comprising a selection of excerpts from Yugoslav press that illustrated the thesis about women being dominantly perceived as sexual objects, and their social role being reduced to motherhood and housekeeping, despite the nominally progressive, egalitarian and socialist tendency of Yugoslav society at the time.<\/p>\n

The exhibitions included a presentation of illustrations by the French cartoonist Claire Bret\u00e9cher, which were also occasionally published in Zagreb-based women review Modni Svjet <\/em>(Djurdja Milanovi\u0107 was the editor in chief, and one of the participants of the conference), and Portraits of Women<\/em>, an exhibition by Goranka Mati\u0107 that presented in the SKC gallery.<\/p>\n

The exhibition by Mati\u0107 included more than forty photographs of women in the format of black-and-white portraits (50 x 60 cm), which were shown along the gallery walls. The process of photographing was conceptualized as a docu-fiction\u2014in parallel to being photographed, women could decide how they would like to be presented by answering the following four questions: How old are you?; What name you would like to have\/get?; Where would you like to live?; What occupation do you desire? Their answers accompanied the portraits in the form of photo captions. The \u201csample\u201d of photographs presented women at various stages of life, with different experiences, professions, and cross-cultural backgrounds. The youngest participants were in the stage right after their first menstrual cycle, while the oldest participants were sometimes over eighty years old. In a conversation with Mati\u0107, she revealed that the oldest \u201ccommrade woman\u201d, who was photographed selling fruits on the Green Market, offered quite a curious answer to the question of employment, stating that she preferred to be occupied by nothing\u2014that her desired \u201cjob\u201d would be to just sit and rest.[3]<\/a> This particular \u201cpiece of data\u201d or personal statement, among other things, also reveals the specific character of Mati\u0107\u2019s questionnaire\u2014the fact that it was about desires and imagination of a \u201cbetter world,\u201d rather than about the \u201cscientific objectivity\u201d of the data collected. The data presented was almost entirely fictional and was meant to address the actual desires of the subjects of the questionnaire. It was only the information about the participants\u2019 age and the personalities that emerged from the photographs that stayed on the side of documentary. Mati\u0107, today one of the most important photographers working in Belgrade and exhibiting internationally, was at the time a young art historian who came up with the concept, and realized the exhibition in collaboration with Neboj\u0161a \u010cankarovi\u0107, who was employed as the photographer of SKC at that time. In that sense, the exhibition can be also explored in terms of a curator-artist relation, or in the context of \u201cdelegated photography\u201d and participatory art\/curatorial practice. Mati\u0107 is also being photographed and represented in the frieze of the Portraits of Women. Her fictional name was Ira Fasbinder, and she presented herself as the thirty-year-old Madam of the Brothel in Budapest. In the photo we see Ira, a young woman with short hair, dressed in a tie, a neat shirt, waistcoat, and jacket, with a cigarette hanging from the corner of her mouth.[4]<\/a> Others who were photographed included some of the participants of the Comrade Woman<\/em> conference, among them Dunja Bla\u017eevi\u0107, Ljubica Stanivuk, and \u017darana Papi\u0107.<\/p>\n

The film and video screening event included presentations of following works: La Roquette, Prison de Femmes <\/em>(1974) by Nil Yalter, Judy Blum, and Nicole Croiset; The Apple Game <\/em>(1977) by Vera Chytilov\u00e1; The<\/em> Living Truth <\/em>(1972) by Tomislav Radi\u0107; The Night Porter <\/em>(1974) by Liliana Cavani; Aggettivo Donna (<\/em>1972) by Rony Dapulo; Il Rischio Vivere <\/em>(1977) by Annabella Miscuglio and Anna Carini; Talking about Love<\/em> (1974\u201375, video) by Jasmina Te\u0161anovi\u0107; Fughe Lineari <\/em>(1975), Puzzle Therapy <\/em>(1976), Rony<\/em>, and Paola<\/em>\u00a0by Annabella Miscuglio; La Bella Addormentata nel Bosco <\/em>(1978), Mio padre amore mio <\/em>(1976), and Aborto: Parlano le donne <\/em>(1976) by Dacia Maraini.<\/p>\n

Papi\u0107 edited the preparatory seminar materials in Serbo-Croatian and English, which included texts by Marxist social feminists (Alexandra Kollontai, Evelyn Reed, and Sheila Rowbotham), feminist-Marxist theoretical psychoanalyists (Shulamith Firestone and Juliet Mitchell), theorists of sexual difference (i.e., Luce Irigaray), and a series of texts on the emergence of the feminist movement in Italy. The reader also included essays by Yugoslav feminists previously published in periodicals such as Vidici<\/em> or \u017dena<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The conference Comrade Woman<\/em> opened up a cluster of important debates facing the long (often conflictual) history of Marxism and feminism, especially within the socialist context, including both the history of people\u2019s struggle for emancipation and of official state politics in real socialist countries. In the Yugoslav context, the issue of women\u2019s liberation is considered to be solved within the paradigm of universal emancipation; for example, the feminist-communist organization Women\u2019s Anti-Fascist Front, or AF\u017d, was self-abolished in 1953, claiming that their \u201chistorical task\u201d was being performed and that the specific \u201cwomen\u2019s issues\u201d were delegated to the state party organization called the Conference for Social Activity of Women\u2014in general, the issue of the liberation of women was considered to be \u201csolved.\u201d However, in Yugoslav context the difference between the nominal political theory or state propaganda in favor of women\u2019s rights, and the actual realization of these ideas in everyday reality remained strikingly visible. Despite of social state investments in women\u2019s liberation through different supports such as education, equal right to work, organized support for reproductive and family care (free medical service, kindergartens, and education), the Yugoslav socialist culture remained essentially patriarchal \u2014the \u201cbourgeois morality,\u201d with all its taboos and constraints remained to loom on the path of \u201cuniversal emancipation.\u201d In that sense, the conference resulted in certain conflicts between the \u201cofficial\u201d and \u201calternative\u2019 spheres,\u201d between the so-called state and autonomous feminisms. In this particular case, \u201cautonomous feminism\u201d was accused by the state media for anarcho-liberalism and new-leftism as reactionary and politically confusing \u201cimports\u201d from the Western capitalist democracy. The debates were conducted in different media and educational contexts, most vividly in the Belgrade magazine Student<\/em>, which regularly followed and reviewed the activities of SKC.<\/p>\n

Critical positioning toward the Yugoslav \u201cstate feminism\u201d at the Comrade Woman<\/em> conference is performed from the similar angle as was the artistic critique of the \u201cstate art\u2019 in October 75 <\/em>and many other socially engaged SKC projects\u2014Comrade Woman<\/em> was considered as a form of\u00a0 \u201cinternal critique\u201d of the Yugoslav system, stemming from the feminist, but also from socialist premises.<\/p>\n

Some aspects of this critical atmosphere were captured in the reportage of the conference by the feminist journalist Vesna Kesi\u0107, which was published in the Zagreb-based magazine Start<\/em>, where she talks about solidarity between young Yugoslav feminists and feminist activists in the West. Kesi\u0107 writes: \u201cTheir path into feminism is mostly similar to our own. They rose together with the men in the 1960s as the members of left students\u2019 movements, as the members of western communist parties or anti-parliamentary left activists. But soon they felt that despite the common struggle for universal emancipation of the humankind and human goals they remained neglected in the theory and practice of these movements. Despite of the declarative equality between men and women which is part of all existing leftist political programs, they confronted with the male intellectual left which suffered from almost identical forms of sexism, of masculine-chauvinist consciousness and non equality that traditionally dominated in bourgeois order.\u201d<\/p>\n

Document: <\/strong>The need for a new approach to the women question<\/a>\u00a0(the summary in English of the conference plan)<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The international conference Comrade Woman: Women\u2019s Question \u2013 A New Approach? (Drug-ca \u017dena: \u017densko Pitanje \u2013 Novi Pristup?) took place at the Student Cultural Centre (SKC), Belgrade, in 1978. It was the first autonomous second-wave feminist meeting in former Yugoslavia, and beyond\u2014the first conference of this kind initiated in non-Western-European context, and in a socialist […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":1248,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"keywords":[53,54,63,352,181,128,93],"locations":[45,41],"persons":[342,353,326,354,355,198,205,356],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tranzit.org\/exhibitionarchive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1243"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tranzit.org\/exhibitionarchive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tranzit.org\/exhibitionarchive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tranzit.org\/exhibitionarchive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tranzit.org\/exhibitionarchive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1243"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tranzit.org\/exhibitionarchive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1243\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tranzit.org\/exhibitionarchive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1248"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tranzit.org\/exhibitionarchive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1243"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tranzit.org\/exhibitionarchive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1243"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tranzit.org\/exhibitionarchive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1243"},{"taxonomy":"keywords","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tranzit.org\/exhibitionarchive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/keywords?post=1243"},{"taxonomy":"locations","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tranzit.org\/exhibitionarchive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/locations?post=1243"},{"taxonomy":"persons","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tranzit.org\/exhibitionarchive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/persons?post=1243"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}