Popular Demand: Yugoslav Socialist Architecture at the Museum of Modern Art (original) (raw)

2018, Art in America, December

In 1976, black feminist poet and theorist Audre Lorde published “Notes from a Trip to Russia,” in which she marveled at the apparent harmony among diverse ethnicities in the Soviet Union. “And it’s not that there are no individuals who are nationalists, or racists,” she wrote, “but that the taking of a state position against nationalism, against racism is what makes it possible for a society like this to function.” The extraordinarily rigorous and thought-provoking exhibition of Yugoslav architecture, on view at New York’s Museum of Modern Art through January 13, similarly positions socialism as the political foundation for a multinational and anti-nationalist society. Co-curated by Martino Stierli and Vladimir Kulić, “Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980” argues that social programs, collectivism, internationalism, and the freedom to experiment shaped the development of architecture in Yugoslavia, and that its distinctive socialist modernism was founded on the project of building a more just and diverse society. A tour de force display of more than four hundred photographs, architectural models, maps, graphs, videos, and installations, “Toward a Concrete Utopia” dazzles its viewers with seductive narratives of anti-fascism embodied in hybrid buildings that amalgamate influences of the Ottoman and Habsburg empires as well as various Western modernisms in the service of Yugoslavia’s socialist revolution.