ABOUT THIS BOOK

Vesna Pavlović: Stagecraft features four extensive bodies of the photographer's work, spanning from the early 2000s to today—photographs of the Yugoslav socialist modernist hotel spaces from her internationally recognized series "Hotels"; photographs of the ceremonial space of the Yugoslav Presidential Palace in Belgrade from the series "Collection/Kolekcija" and the recent "Fabrics of Socialism" and "Sites of Memory" series exploring the archives of the Museum of Yugoslav History.

The book includes critical essays that contextualize and expound on Pavlović's unique treatment of the photographic medium, in which a photographic moment is expanded to include the conditions of image making, production, documentation, and representation.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Vesna Pavlović is an associate professor of art, Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow (2020), Fulbright Scholar (2018–19), and Chancellor Fellow (2018–20) at Vanderbilt University. Her work has been exhibited widely and is included in major private and public art collections, including the Phillips Collection, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Museum of Women in the Arts, and the Art in Embassies Program in Washington, DC; the Princeton University Art Gallery in Princeton, New Jersey; the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona; and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade, Serbia, among others. Her work has previously been published in Vesna Pavlović’s Lost Art: Photography, Display, and the Archive. More information about Vesna Pavlović can be found at http://vesna-pavlovic.com.

REVIEWS

"A significant contribution to scholarship on contemporary artistic practices from the region of Former Yugoslavia. Pavlović warrants this kind of in-depth engagement."
—Uroš Čvoro, author of Transitional Aesthetics: Contemporary Art at the Edge of Europe— -

"Pavlović probes the ability of the photographic medium to engage with the great abstractions of modern life, such as ideology, memory, geopolitics, and historical change. The abandoned project of socialist Yugoslavia is at the same time the material object of her photos, their omnipresent reference point, and the ghost that haunts them."
—Vladimir Kulić, editor of Second World Postmodernisms: Architecture and Society under Late Socialism— -

"A significant contribution to scholarship on contemporary artistic practices from the region of Former Yugoslavia. Pavlović warrants this kind of in-depth engagement."
—Uroš Čvoro, author of Transitional Aesthetics: Contemporary Art at the Edge of Europe— -

"Pavlović probes the ability of the photographic medium to engage with the great abstractions of modern life, such as ideology, memory, geopolitics, and historical change. The abandoned project of socialist Yugoslavia is at the same time the material object of her photos, their omnipresent reference point, and the ghost that haunts them."
—Vladimir Kulić, editor of Second World Postmodernisms: Architecture and Society under Late Socialism— -

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Artist's Note | by Vesna Pavlović
Introduction | by Jelena Vesić
Vesna Pavlović: The Photographic Staging of the Nonperformative | by Branislav Dimitrijević
Stagecrafting: Everything Here Is Both Lost and Gained in Translation | by Jelena Vesić
Transnational Time: Unsettling Borders and Media in Vesna Pavlović's Oeuvre | by Jordan Amirkhani
Ghosts in the Present Tense: The Photography of Vesna Pavlović | by John J. Curley
Images
Index of Images
Artist Biography
Contributors