Architecture of Yugoslav Modernism as Quotation within Contemporary Art

Understanding Intermedial Quoting: Architecture of Yugoslav Modernism as Quotation within Contemporary Art by Sonja Jankov examines how contemporary artists engage with the architectural legacy of socialist Yugoslavia through processes of citation, reinterpretation, and critical reactivation. Drawing on theories of intertextuality, semiotics, and post-structuralist analysis, the publication positions Yugoslav modernist architecture not simply as historical heritage, but as a complex political and cultural “text” whose meanings continue to shift across time. Through analyses of artistic practices produced after 2000, the book explores how buildings, monuments, urban plans, and infrastructural projects become material through which artists address questions of ideology, collective memory, political transition, and the unstable afterlives of modernism.

A central argument of the publication is that the architecture of Yugoslav modernism functioned as far more than built infrastructure: it acted as an active instrument of representation for the socialist project itself. Jankov traces how architecture operated within Yugoslavia as a vehicle for modernization, non-alignment, transnational diplomacy, workers’ self-management, and the construction of supranational identity. Equally important, however, is the book’s examination of what happened after the collapse of Yugoslavia — how these architectural forms underwent radical semantic shifts through privatization, neglect, ideological revisionism, and new nationalist narratives.

Within this broader framework, Jasmina Cibic’s work is positioned as one of the publication’s key case studies. Jankov frames Cibic’s artistic practice as a particularly sophisticated form of “intermedial quoting,” in which architecture, film, choreography, rhetoric, and scenography become intertwined systems of political representation. Rather than treating architecture as static heritage, Cibic approaches it as a performative apparatus through which ideologies are staged, embodied, and contested.

The book analyses a number of Cibic’s major works, including State of Illusion, Tear Down and Rebuild, The Pavilion, The Gift, and Beacons, focusing on her recurring use of buildings such as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade, the Federal Executive Council, the unrealised Museum of the Revolution, and the Yugoslav pavilion for Expo 1967 in Montreal. In these works, architecture becomes both subject and stage: a structure carrying the ideological ambitions of twentieth-century statecraft while simultaneously revealing the instability and theatricality of political power itself.

Jankov argues that Cibic transforms these architectural sites into spaces of political choreography. Through staged gestures, illusionistic performances, archival speeches, and carefully constructed scenographies, her works expose the mechanisms through which nations construct collective identity and project authority. Architecture in Cibic’s practice is never neutral; it is treated as an active participant in the production of ideology, diplomacy, and historical memory.

Particular emphasis is placed on the contradictory status these buildings occupy today. Jankov describes them as forms of “syllepsis” — structures that simultaneously embody utopian aspiration and political collapse, collective emancipation and institutional failure. Through contemporary artistic reactivation, Cibic reveals how the symbolic languages of Yugoslav modernism continue to resonate within present political realities, even after the disappearance of the state systems that produced them.

Rather than approaching Yugoslav modernism nostalgically, the publication positions Cibic’s work as a critical investigation into the ways political systems aestheticise themselves through culture, architecture, and spectacle. Her installations and films do not simply reconstruct historical narratives, but expose the ongoing relationship between representation and power — asking how societies remember, suppress, and continually rewrite their ideological pasts.