Design, Socialism, Modernism: A Didactic Exhibition
KIC – Galerija na katu
Exhibition opening / 16. 5. / 12:00
Curatorial concept: Dejan Kršić
Collaborators: Marko Golub and Tena Lovrenčić
The exhibition Design, Socialism, Modernism: A Didactic Exhibition emerges from the understanding that design, visual communications, popular culture, and art, in their broadest sense, may serve as a „royal road“ toward analyzing and interpreting the development of Yugoslav society during the socialist modernization of the latter half of the 20th century. In its scope, the exhibition does not aspire to be a comprehensive critical overview, nor does it purport to present an ideal selection of „masterpieces“ from the history of Croatian design. Rather, through the lens of design and visual communications, it seeks to pose questions about how the internal dynamics and tensions of social relations were reflected within the sphere of Yugoslav cultural production. In what ways did visual language, graphic design, and artistic practices shape, and how were they in turn shaped by, the transformations of society?
The stories we tell ourselves today as a society about the socialist period and the art of that time are far from simple. They are fraught with contradictions, ambivalence, and ideologically opposed positions and interpretations; for this reason, particularly in a post-socialist context, they are often simplified and reduced to clichés. Established terms such as „socialist art“ and “art in socialism“ frequently obscure more than they reveal. The former implies that the entirety of art from that period was necessarily ideologically determined and subject to political dictate. The latter, however, presents the relationship between art and the social sphere as something passive and depoliticizing, as if it „simply happened“ within a social system, thereby reducing artists to bystanders devoid of agency, the power to create social transformations, or the capacity for negotiation and resistance. In both cases, the complex interplay between art and politics remains masked. The phrase art of socialism acknowledges that the art and design of this period emerged from dynamic relationships with the socialist project of modernization and social emancipation.
Treating the products of graphic design as material traces of a society in a specific time, the exhibition is dedicated to the relationships, successions, and mutual tensions between tendencies that are well-known yet often ill-defined, or simplified to the point of caricature, under the names socialist realism, socialist modernism, and socialist aestheticism. While the rift between socialist realism and socialist modernism has been frequently discussed, and thus reduced to several often problematic clichés, the relationship between socialist modernism and socialist aestheticism has remained largely unexamined.
The term socialist aestheticism was coined by literary theorist Sveta Lukić to describe changes in literature during the 1950s and 60s; it was later used sporadically in art criticism, notably in reflections on architecture, such as the monuments of Bogdan Bogdanović, and in the analysis of shifts in lyrical abstraction and the commodification of radical Art Informel. In Croatian art criticism, however, this term never took hold or became a subject of serious theoretical reflection, especially regarding graphic design production, which remains caught in traditional binaries of realism versus modernism, or illustrative figuration versus geometric abstraction.
The subtitle Didactic Exhibition is a direct reference to the historic Didactic Exhibition of Abstract Art launched in the late 1950s by a group of artists, art historians, and curators gathered around the then Gallery of Contemporary Art (now MSU). It also recalls the exhibition Designed in Croatia – A Didactic Exhibition, which Kršić realized in 2009 at the then newly launched HDD Gallery; thus, this exhibition stands as a continuation of an enduring interest in what we call a „book in the medium of an exhibition.“ It unfolds as a multitude of spatially „collaged“ original works, reproductions, texts, references and footnotes that jointly chart the shifting contours of design, visual communications, and the broader intersections of art and society over four decades.
