How Will We Return?
Letters to the past and the future
It's 1985, a year before I was born. In Belgrade, the winter has loosened its grip, though its memory lingers in the bones and in the rationing of coffee, electricity and fuel. For twenty-four consecutive, blistering winter days in December and January, the daily temperature never rose above 0 °C. It was one of the longest freezing streaks in the city's recorded history. Now the cold and the blackouts have subsided and in an office on 6 Lenin Street, warmed by little more than resolve, someone, or several someones, bend over a page, searching for words of solidarity that Yugoslav women might send to the Palestinian women due to gather in Tunis.
It's the same year, and spring lingers over Tunis as April turns to May. The air is mild and the light gentle. Inside the Hotel Amilcar, the Fourth Conference of the General Federation of Palestinian Women is in session. In attendance are “Palestinian sisters” who spent long years in the Zionist occupation's prisons, freed from captivity in late 1983. Some important men sit in the front row. A representative of the Federal Conference for the Issues of the Social Status of Women of Yugoslavia is about to deliver the greetings that travelled down the Adriatic and across the Mediterranean, a message carried by the same waters that touched different shores. She begins;
“Dear comrades,
I am very pleased to have the honour of conveying greetings to you on behalf of the Conference for the Issues of the Social Status of Women of Yugoslavia, and on behalf of all the women of Yugoslavia I thank you for the invitation you extended to the conference, and I hope that the work of your conference will be crowned with success.
[...]
The people of Yugoslavia and the women of Yugoslavia are aware of your just struggle for freedom and for the establishment of a free, independent Palestinian state, and of the difficulties you face in your popular liberation struggle. The contribution of women to your struggle is immense and an integral part of it. Without it, the goal, which is freedom, cannot be achieved.
The women of Yugoslavia, [...], led by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, entered the field of struggle against fascism and Nazism and their collaborators during the Second World War. These days, and specifically on May 9th, Yugoslavia celebrates the victory over fascism, a victory achieved through the common struggle alongside other progressive peoples and nations, in which all the peoples and nationalities of Yugoslavia actively participated, including women on an equal footing. As we mark this anniversary, we highlight the great contribution women made to the people's liberation struggle and to the development of socialism. Since we ourselves have this experience, we sincerely affirm our support for your just struggle. We too lived through the siege of war and the fight for liberation, and at the same time, together with the other progressive forces in our society, our socio-political system declared the principles of a socialist society, in which men and women participate equally in all areas of decision-making. This is guaranteed by the constitution and laws of our socialist self-managing country.
[...]
We still encounter certain difficulties, and we must keep working for the consistent application of the constitution and the law, until the remnants of patriarchal consciousness and traditions are completely overcome, and until all the rights women gained through their contribution to the people's war, the revolution and the rebuilding of the country after the war are fully and lastingly realised. Women, the working class and all working people today take part in carrying out the tasks of completing the development of the political system of socialist self-management, accelerating material prosperity, completing the economic stabilisation program, strengthening brotherhood and unity among our nations and nationalities, and holding firm in international relations on the basis of the principles and aims of the policy of non-alignment, whose foundations were laid during President Tito's lifetime.
[...]
The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia [...] unequivocally support the struggle of the Palestinian people and insist on Israel's withdrawal, without conditions or restrictions, from all the Arab and Palestinian territories occupied in 1967, and for the realisation of the Palestinian people's inalienable rights to self-determination, independence and sovereignty, and to the establishment of their own state on their own land. [...]
[...]
Dear comrades, I wish once more that your conference's proceedings will be crowned with success, and that you will continue to improve the situation of Palestinian women. I also express our readiness to continue cooperation between the General Federation of Palestinian Women and the Conference for the Issues of the Social Status of Women of Yugoslavia.”
It's October 2026, and the weather in London has turned. The summer was apocalyptic. The heat that pressed down on the city for weeks left the parks faded to a dusty orange I have never seen here before. Now autumn seems to be arriving, and I am relieved by its crispness. My hands are cold.
I sit to read these messages from the past once more. The pages are cream-coloured and slightly skewed in their scans. I am using modern technology to decipher them, feeding the scans into a machine that reads the Arabic lines that I cannot. I am reminded that I really should have committed to learning the language. Maybe it's not too late. I should really do it soon.
I notice that page 3 of the speech appears to be missing. The numbers run 2, then 4, and I wonder whether it’s a typo, a slip of the numbering, or whether a whole page really is gone. Was it lost, misfiled, never scanned or kept? Did it even exist?
I think about the gaps in archives, and about my desire to fill them. I think about time travel and generational disappointments, and I wonder if the women in that hall thought of this too. I scan the photograph of the meeting held at the sidelines of the conference for signs of this. Impossible to know.
Just a few short months following the conference, on 1 October 1985, in an operation they called Wooden Leg, Israeli jets bombed the PLO's headquarters outside Tunis. In Belgrade, the brotherhood and unity named in the speech has a few years left, and the stabilisation programme will give way to inflation, then to war, and the country that sent the greeting will be gone before I am old enough to remember it.
In Celtic Christian tradition, a thin place is where two realms press so closely they almost touch. As I disappear deeper into the letters and speeches, I find myself in the orbit of familiar vocabulary. Time starts to feel like a thin place too. The distance between these pages and today feels more permeable than linear chronology allows. I am caught in the arc of a returning boomerang, suspended in constellations, not timelines.
Today, a free Palestine has yet to arrive. But we promise that it will. We insist that it will.
Prompted by Munira Khayyat, I think about what tense all this belongs in. I think about October. I think about ellipses. You sit in them too. Are the three dots comfortable?
I ask myself if time is a traitor and the archive a trickster. I drift into a daydream about the women at that conference, tasting freedom after years in the occupation's prisons. I think of the letters and poems I have written for almost two years to a friend who is held in one of those prisons today. Letters I cannot send. I think about his freedom as a debt that is owed to the sky.
Outside, the Sunday light is low. The sun slants in through my windows, bringing with it an unnerving sense of calm. I realise that I have already resolved to write in the present. I pour a second cup of coffee, and turn to another letter. I begin;
Dear A,
[...]
Angelina Radaković
London, UK
OVERVIEW
A SERIES OF THOUGHT-PROVOKING DIALOGUES BETWEEN CULTURAL PRACTITIONERS AND SCHOLARS FROM THE ALSERKAL ARTS FOUNDATION CIRCLE, BRINGING THEM TOGETHER FOR NEW DEBATE AND DISCUSSION.
As a cultural platform, Alserkal is a site of knowledge production, participation, and assembly. Adjusting to the disruption and anxiety caused by the global COVID-19 pandemic and recent geo-political events, it feels imperative to ask questions, provoke and generate thought, and to keep learning. We cannot act like nothing has happened when everything has changed. Through the experimental format of How Will We Return?, we attempt to create the space for pause within the urgencies that impact us all, allowing ourselves the time to reflect on broader cultural shifts.
The public art commission The Circle Game was installed in 2016, an iconic beacon for Alserkal Avenue, and a poetic reflection on the processes of arrival and return, transience, and permanence. The LED signs that read When did you arrive and When will you return have since become synonymous with Alserkal Avenue, a space driven by local creative ambition and collective energy.
We now regroup to consider what it will mean to gather and rebuild, to ‘return’, both during and after this time of extraordinary social anguish, and economic, cultural, and human damage. How can we make sense of this shared – yet isolating – experience, and really begin to reckon with its impact and possibilities?
In close dialogue with Mary Ellen Carroll, we paired practitioners and thought-leaders from our MEASA networks and beyond, breaking away from our own echo chambers to enable fresh conversations and new solidarities. Hailing from different disciplines and geographies, we invited them to meet online for long-form conversations. This has allowed for deeper engagement and discussion around concepts stemming from their work, focusing on critical ideas — particularly ethics, solidarity, collective practice, structural transformation, and modes of learning in the context of cultural production.
Presented in three volumes – The Ethical (Re)Imagination, Mujawaara, and Techno-Dystopia – which built up into a live round table conversation, we view How Will We Return? as an epistemic project, shaping the organisational approach and future direction of the Alserkal Arts Foundation.
We hope that this will become both blueprint and archive, as we attempt to formulate compelling responses offering real insight and intuition, and lasting well beyond the present moment.
VOLUME 1: ETHICAL (RE)IMAGINING
ETHICAL (RE)IMAGINING
With Mary Ellen Carroll and Lumumba Di-Aping
Mary Ellen Carroll’s artistic projects have involved a critical and extended scrutiny of the systems and processes that produce social disparity through public policy and civic infrastructure. Lumumba Di-Aping trained as an economist before working in international diplomacy, particularly focused on social justice and the global implications of climate change. Bringing them together, we generate new debate on the role of the state, art and culture, public policy, and public intellectuals in the wake of the present crisis. This conversation was recorded in May 2020, and was prescient in foregrounding the momentum that resurged in the Black Lives Matter movement – spilling onto the streets and spreading across cities in the United States – and reverberating across the world.
00:02:37 The Ethical Imagination
00:14:14 Infrastructure and Economics
00:33:10 The Role of Culture
00:49:29 Closing the Gap for Future Generations
01:04:42 Radical Solidarity
01:12:20 Collective Movements and Individual Commitment
VOLUME 2: MUJAWAARA
MUJAWAARA: DECOLONIZING KNOWLEDGE/ COLLECTIVE LEARNING
with Katya García-Antón, Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti
‘How can we live, express, interact, think, and converse beyond professional terminologies, academic categories, and the logic of institutions? For Munir Fasheh, mujawaara is a form of organisation without hierarchy. Mujawaara is a medium of learning. It is a basic ingredient in stitching together the social, intellectual, and spiritual fabric of communities. Mujawaara embodies the spirit of regeneration in the most important aspect of life: learning. It demonstrates that another vision of education is possible.’
From Permanent Temporariness, Sandi Hilal and Allesandro Petti
Borrowing this notion of ‘neighbouring’, we introduced Sandi and Alessandro, currently in Stockholm, to Katya García-Antón. Her work at the Office for Contemporary Art in Oslo seeks to radically dismantle the structure of the arts institution to become a platform for underserved and politically marginalised cultural communities. Thinking from the margins, they discuss the imperative to decolonize knowledge and to produce collective space, and challenge the modes in which cultural organisations generate socially engaged and ephemeral projects through the labour of individual cultural practitioners and activists.
While we encourage you to listen to the conversation in full, you can also navigate the conversation through the themes and subjects discussed:
00:08:20 Dislocation as Method
00:15:49 Transforming Structures
00:28:00 The Guest and the Host
00:37:35 Collective Knowledge/ Collective Ownership
01:11:53 The Possibility of Multiple Returns
TECHNO-DYSTOPIA
TECHNO-DYSTOPIA: TURTLES ALL THE WAY DOWN
with Basim Magdy and Jahnavi Phalkey
How did we get here? In science fiction or speculative realism, dystopian and even apocalyptic futures have been imagined since the early 20th century. As fans of the genre will know, sci-fi’s themes and characterizations – climate catastrophe, the figure of the ‘alien’, hyper-surveillance, post-apocalyptic rebuilding of world systems, post-human worlds run by artificial intelligence – are often thinly veiled reality or uncanny predictions. In the present, these imaginaries, whether from novels or cinema, feel even more plausible, blurring the boundaries between the imagined and the real. Bringing together a historian of science and an artist associated with speculative realism, we considered whether conjecture is in fact a form of prophecy. If so, might we return to the utopian imagination of a fairer, healed planet, or conversely, prepare for further catastrophe?
While we encourage you to listen to the conversation in full, you can also navigate the conversation through the themes and subjects discussed:
00:02:45 Techno-isolation and the Perception of Danger
00:22:34 History Repeats Itself, or Time is a Squashed Fly on an Endless White Wall
00:35:35 Silver Linings: New Possibilities for Practice and Learning
00:49:30 Contagion – The Transmission of Ideas
01:01:50 Art, Science and Spontaneity
01:09:50 Turtles All the Way Down (with Cautious Optimism for Future Generations)
MUTUAL UNDERSTANDING
MUTUAL UNDERSTANDING: A VIRTUAL ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION
Columbia University philosophy professor Akeel Bilgrami situates the discussion with a framework to integrate and address the themes that have emerged from the first three conversations. He opens the conversation with a set of key questions for our speakers: If the move to digital communication has produced a new enthusiasm for sharing knowledge, what systems or institutions do we need to ensure generosity rather than profiteering? What is the idea of ‘return’ – to the same systems that have produced inequality – or can we distinguish between a revival of the ruthlessly capital-oriented systems, and something that might be more ethical and generative?
BIOS
Akeel Bilgrami got a B.A in English Literature from Elphinstone College, Bombay University and went to Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, where he read Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. He has a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Chicago. He has held the Johnsonian Professorship of Philosophy and holds the Sidney Morgenbesser Chair of Philosophy at Columbia University, where he is also a Professor on the Committee on Global Thought. He has been the Director of the Heyman Centre for the Humanities as well as the South Asian Institute at Columbia. He is the Editor of the Journal of Philosophy and also the President of its Board of Trustees. His publications include the books Belief and Meaning (1992), Self-Knowledge and Resentment (2006), and Secularism, Identity and Enchantment (2014) and well over a hundred articles on topics ranging from the nature of meaning to the relation between religion, politics, society and culture. He is due to publish two books in the near future: What is a Muslim? (Princeton University Press) and Gandhi, The Philosopher (Columbia University Press). His longer-term future work is on the relations between value, agency, and practical reason.
He has held Visiting positions at Oxford University, Yale University, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Australian National University, he has held the Radhakrishnan Chair and the Tagore Chair in India, and has received a number of awards –from the New Public Library, the National Institute of the Humanities, the Ford Foundation, the Luce Foundation, twice from the Mellon Foundation, and the Social Scientist of the Year award in India in 2015. He has given lectures in virtually every major university and several other prestigious international venues. He has served on the Jury of the Architecture Award for the Aga Khan Foundation as well as on the Jury for the Infosys Humanities Prize for the last several years and is its current Jury Chairman.
Basim Magdy’s work subjects us to the world through a satirical eye. His drawings, sculptures, videos and installations are conceived with a taste for the absurd. They build a universe that has gone off-kilter. Like dreams, elements of a familiar landscape stem out of reality. Past, present and future exist as a single realm and depictions – often of foliage and ruins, astronauts and rockets, airplanes, soldiers, cranes and modernist structures – take on a surreal aggressive quality. Magdy’s references abound: they range from the slick veneer of advertising, the sinister tropes of science fiction and comic-strip to the documentary style of nature, science and technology shows and the apocalyptic tone of biblical stories. His videos, in particular, progress like a series of still images permeated with a haunted air that heightens our sense of suspense. In almost all his work, poetic but ambiguous titles add another layer to the narrative. Magdy stretches the boundaries of our imagination to test the logic of the truth which often lies somewhere between reality and fiction.
His films, including Turtles All the Way Down, The Dent and M.A.G.N.E.T can be viewed online at https://www.basimmagdy.com/.
Jahnavi Phalkey was appointed Founding Director of Science Gallery Bengaluru in November 2018. Previously Jahnavi held a tenured faculty position at King’s College London. She started her academic career at the University of Heidelberg, following which she was based at Georgia Tech-Lorraine, France, and Imperial College London. Jahnavi was Fellow, Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (the Institute of Advanced Study, Berlin). She was also external curator to the Science Museum London, and has been a Scholar-in-Residence at the Deutsches Museum, Munich.
A historian of science and technology, Jahnavi is the author of Atomic State: Big Science in Twentieth Century India and has co-edited Science of Giants: China and India in the Twentieth Century. She is the producer-director of the documentary film Cyclotron.
Jahnavi read civics and politics at the University of Bombay and the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. She holds a doctoral degree in history of science and technology from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta. She is the Sir Asutosh Mukherjee Visiting Professor at the National Institute of Advanced Studies.
Read Jahnavi’s recent article on scientific information and counter-information around the pandemic, and how publics need a more nuanced approach.
Katya García-Antón is director of the Office of Contemporary Art Norway. She graduated as a biologist, conducted two years of predoctoral field research in ecology and behavior in the Amazon and Sierra Leone, and transitioned into the arts with a master’s degree in nineteenth- and twentieth-century art history from The Courtauld Institute of Arts, London. Thereafter she worked at The Courtauld Institute of Art, BBC World Service (Latin American Broadcasts), Museo Nacional Reina Sofía Madrid, ICA London, IKON Birmingham, and as director of the Centre d’Art Contemporain (CAC) Genève. She is responsible for more than seventy exhibitions of art, architecture, and design of practitioners worldwide. She curated the Nordic Pavilion, Venice Biennial in 2015, the Spanish Pavilion in the São Paolo Biennial 2004 and in the Venice Biennial 2011, cocurated the Prague Biennial 2005, and cocurated the flagship exhibition Gestures in Time in Qalandiya International Biennial 2012. In 2015 she launched Critical Writing Ensembles, a platform dedicated to stimulating the research and writing of art history that extends beyond the Western canon (including South Asia and Indigenous worldviews). She devised Thinking at the Edge of the World: Perspectives from the North in 2015 as an on-going program of knowledge-building (exhibitions and symposiums) addressing the histories of the North—including Arctic and environmental questions—and specially facilitating the empowerment of Sami artistic practices and histories. In this regard García-Antón has placed particular emphasis on advocating for, and implementing, decolonial practices and programs. She is currently devising a programme addressing decolonial thinking from the perspective of the Afro-Norwegian communities in Norway in collaboration with various of its peers, that will run until 2022, and lead to a conference on the subject of Whiteness.
Read Katya’s letter in response to the challenges of Covid-19.
Lumumba Di-Aping has dedicated his career in both the public and private sectors to addressing the inequality that hinders the development of the Global South. From his early career as a strategy consultant and investment banker, he moved on to serving as ambassador and deputy head of the Sudan mission to the United Nations from 2006-2012. During that tenure, he was Lead Negotiator for Developing Countries on Energy, Environment, Trade and Global Governance and Chairman of the G77+China group of 132 developing nations and led the block’s negotiation on reform of the International Financial Institutions (IMF/WB) and at the Copenhagen climate conference. He served as chairman of the African Group and chief negotiator for developing countries. He is a member of the National Liberation Council of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement and political Bureau, a group that helped end 20 years of civil war when it signed the comprehensive Peace Agreement in 2005. Ambassador Di-Aping is currently based in Sharjah, UAE, where he is the Chair of the Rights of Future Generations Working Group which was founded during the inaugural edition of the Sharjah Architecture Triennial.
Mary Ellen Carroll’s (MEC, studios) prolific career as a conceptual artist spans more than twenty years and primarily occupies the disciplines of architecture/design and public policy, technology, writing, performance and film. The foundation of the practice is the investigation of a single, fundamental question: what do we consider a work of art? Carroll frequently works with unsuspecting materials that range from public policy and land use (prototype180.org) to unused television frequencies as a form of 21st century land art (PublicUtility2.com), albeit the valuable and non-visible real estate of radio frequency. She is the recipient of numerous grants and honors, including the Berlin Prize at the American Academy in Berlin for 2016, a Graham Foundation Fellowship for prototype 180 and the AIA’s Artist of the Year Award. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, two Pollack/Krasner Awards, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship and a MacDowell Colony Fellowship. Carroll was also awarded a Pennies From Heaven Award for her contribution to New York City for work that contributes to the cultural realm and is socially visionary. Her work has been exhibited at numerous American and international institutions and galleries, including the Whitney Museum-New York, Generali Foundation-Vienna, Austria, Jacobs Museum-Zurich, Switzerland, ICA Philadelphia, the Renaissance Society-Chicago, ICA-London, Museum für Völkerkunde-Munich, MOMUK-Vienna. Her work belongs in numerous public and private collections.
Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti have developed a research and project-based artistic practice that is both theoretically ambitious and practically engaged in the struggle for justice and equality. They founded Campus in Camps, an experimental educational program hosted in Dheisheh Refugee Camp in Bethlehem with the aims to overcome conventional educational structures by creating a space for critical and grounded knowledge production connected to greater transformations and the democratization of society. In 2007 with Eyal Weizman they founded DAAR (Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency) in Beit Sahour, Palestine, with the aim to combine an architectural studio and an art residency able to gathered together architects, artists, activists, urbanists, film-makers, and curators to work collectively on the subjects of politics and architecture.
Alessandro is a professor of Architecture and Social Justice at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm and Sandi has initiated the Living Room project, a series of spaces of hospitality that have the potential to subvert the role of guest and host. Hilal was the head of the Infrastructure and Camp Improvement Program in the West Bank at UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) from 2008 to 2014. Alessandro Petti has written on the emerging spatial order dictated by the paradigm of security and control in Archipelagos and enclaves (Bruno Mondadori, Milan 2007) and more recently Petti and Hilal co-authored with Eyal Weizman the book Architecture after Revolution (Sternberg, Berlin 2014) an invitation to rethink today’s struggles for justice and equality not only from the historical perspective of revolution, but also from that of a continued struggle for decolonization.
Their latest publication Permanent Temporariness (Art and Theory, Stockholm 2019) is a book, a catalog, and an archive that accounts for 15 years of research and experimentation, and creation that are marked by an inner tension and a visionary drive that re-thinks itself through collective engagement. Permanent Temporariness was published in connection with their eponymous retrospective exhibition that was inaugurated at the New York University Abu Dhabi Art Gallery in 2018, and at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven in 2019.
What We Plant, What We Owe
I grew up in a small village in southern Slovenia, surrounded by forests. My grandmother gathered herbs; my father and grandfather worked in forestry. From our elders, we learned that the forest gives and the forest takes. We also learned to take only what we needed, and to understand that the forest was not ours to possess.
This knowledge has stayed with me. It shapes how I think about our relationship with the living world, and how I approach the history of the Non-Aligned Movement: not only as a political project of decolonisation and independence, but also as an unfinished experiment in imagining how we might live together, across differences, without submitting to the centres of power.
At the founding conference of the Non-Aligned Movement in Belgrade in 1961, political leaders planted plane trees. Similar ceremonies took place at later summits, with trees chosen for their particular meanings and origins. Flowers, too, were carefully arranged for meetings and diplomatic encounters. These gestures might seem ceremonial, even ornamental. Yet a tree is never only a symbol. It takes root in a particular place, draws water from the earth, grows through time, and outlives those who plant it. It reminds us that political futures, like forests, require conditions in which different forms of life can exist together. But still, we must ask. Who plants, and on whose land? Who decides what should grow, what must be cleared, and which forms of life are considered expendable? The planting of trees, like the language of conservation itself, can also carry the legacy of colonial control over land and people. Colonial forestry turned forests into sources of timber and revenue, closing them to those who had lived from them for generations. Many protected areas were created by displacing the very communities who had cared for the land.
Environmental concerns were not at the centre of the Non-Aligned Movement’s early programme. Gradually, however, ecological balance became inseparable from issues of sovereignty, development and global inequality. The point was larger than protecting nature: it was to ask who profited from its destruction, who controlled its resources, and who was expected to pay the price. These questions remain urgent.
From oil extraction and poisoned landscapes to deforestation and the destruction of ecosystems through war, environmental devastation follows the unequal distribution of power. In Gaza today, the destruction of land, water, farms and olive groves, what many describe as ecocide, shows how the erasure of a people and the erasure of their living environment go hand in hand. To uproot an olive grove is to undo the act of planting, and with it a people’s claim to a future on their own land. There is only one Earth, but we do not inhabit it on equal terms.
Perhaps flowers and trees offer a way of thinking about solidarity beyond political declarations. Not as a universal language that erases differences, but as a practice grounded in specific places, histories and responsibilities. A seed carries the possibility of a future, but never guarantees it. What grows depends on the soil, the climate, the hands that tend it, and the forces that threaten its survival.
To return to the Non-Aligned Movement today is not to restore an idealised past. It is to ask what remains of its unfinished promises, and what new forms of solidarity they might make possible. What would it mean to treat the Earth not as property or an inexhaustible resource, but as a shared condition of life?
We are guests here.
Bojana Piškur
Ljubljana, Slovenia
About the Non-Aligned Constellations Working Group
Grounded in the concept of ‘constellations’ and derived from the Southern Constellations exhibition series (launched in 2019 at Moderna galerija, Ljubljana, Slovenia), this research explores the intersection of art, history, and geography, with a particular focus on the global relationships fostered through the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). The project investigates the legacy of the Gallery of Art of the Non-Aligned Countries Josip Broz Tito (Titograd, 1981–1995), whose collection, comprising 800 works from 56 NAM countries, is now housed at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Montenegro. Curators Angelina Radaković, Bojana Piškur, and Natalija Vujošević (the initiator of the Art Collection of Non-Aligned Countries Laboratory project at MSUCG) aim to revive the collection through participatory, experimental, and interdisciplinary methods. By engaging with its historical and political context, they seek to reestablish connections with cultural actors from the Global South. Tracing the exchanges of solidarity, this project will reframe the artworks, offering new perspectives on the cultural and political dialogues that shaped both the past and present.
Bojana Piškur is a senior curator at Moderna galerija in Ljubljana. Her research and curatorial work focus on the Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav context, the Non-Aligned Movement, and the evolving concept of the ‘East(s)’. Since 2019, Piškur has curated and co-curated Southern Constellations exhibitions at institutions such as Moderna galerija (Ljubljana), Asia Culture Center, Gwangju (South Korea), Filodrammatica Gallery (Rijeka, Croatia), Museumof Contemporary Art of Montenegro (Podgorica), the Qattan Foundation (Ramallah, Palestine), National Opera and Ballet (Skopje, North Macedonia), and The Mosaic Rooms (London, UK).
Bodies expanding, bodies contracting
I will tell you exactly where the Gallery of Art of the Non-Aligned Countries is located in my memory, in my body, and in the body of the building itself.
It was sometime around 1986, and I was a ten-year-old girl. As part of a school activity, we visited the Gallery of Art of the Non-Aligned Countries “Josip Broz Tito.” The Gallery was housed in the Petrović Palace, in Kruševac Park. We are in the attic, and it is crowded. The air is stuffy, my sweater is itching, I can feel myself sweating, and my feet hurt because of my flat arches. We are having a music lesson, looking at a collection of musical instruments from Indonesia, Burma, and Congo. Our teacher tells us that we belong to the Non-Aligned Movement. She explains that these instruments were gifts to the Gallery from friendly countries. She tells us that, together with these countries, we form a community committed to peaceful coexistence, one that refuses to join military alliances seeking to dominate others through the law of the strongest. She speaks about anti-colonial and anti-imperialist politics, and about how the community of non-aligned countries holds a different vision of the world, one in which relationships are built on mutual support, respect for others, and recognition of differences.
I do not know how much of the political language our teacher used to explain non-alignment I understood at the time. But I clearly remember the feeling that came with realizing that we belonged to something much larger than the country we lived in. My itchy, sweaty body expands from within, and I am filled with a joyful sense of belonging, pride, and responsibility.
Today, this memory feels like an abandoned utopia. But that utopia had its own public infrastructure. The building has shrunk and fallen into neglect. Since the 1990s, three different institutions have occupied it. Behind it, a new and much larger building housing the American Embassy has appeared. For decades, the collection has remained largely out of public view, while the struggle to bring it back into public life continues, with uncertain outcomes.
For years, researchers supported by grants from European, Canadian, and American universities have been visiting the museum to study and write about the non-aligned collection. Their interest often makes an important contribution to the collection’s visibility and understanding. Yet the question remains of how the resources, authority, and outcomes of such research are distributed. Who gets the opportunity to produce knowledge, build an academic career, and determine interpretive frameworks, and who remains the custodian of archival materials and a provider of information? Do the methodologies and principles underpinning these research relationships reflect the very values that are the subject of the research itself? Are these relationships anti-colonial, reciprocal, and grounded in solidarity?
Young people from the local community who visit the museum know almost nothing about this heritage, or about the Non-Aligned Movement. Their political education takes place within the horizon of Euro-Atlantic integration and the market economy, while historical experiences of alternative forms of international relations have almost disappeared from public education. At the same time, cultural heritage is increasingly valued in terms of its tourism and market potential.
In the post-Cold War order, marked by new forms of neocolonial domination, the heritage of non-alignment is becoming increasingly visible within international academia, while remaining difficult to access for the communities from which it emerged. It acquires new value as an object of research, but not necessarily as public knowledge or social practice. Today, narratives surrounding the political imagination of non-alignment circulate predominantly through the channels of Western academia and within the specialized discourse of contemporary art, in publications and at panels where access is restricted by class, economic, and institutional barriers.
These barriers determine whose bodies can expand from within today, and whose contract. They are not merely obstacles to accessing information, but part of a broader asymmetrical distribution of resources, knowledge, and the possibility of imagining the world differently. In postsocialist societies, where decades of privatization have transformed material and collectively held goods, the question arises whether a similar fate threatens heritage, ideas, and political imagination itself.
I wonder how we can learn from the Non-Aligned Movement today without turning its heritage into yet another resource for academic and market valorization. How can we re-establish the principles of solidarity, reciprocity, and collective action as practices, beginning with research exchanges and the production of knowledge themselves? How can we once again create places where bodies can expand from within, where knowledge can generate a sense of belonging, solidarity, and the possibility of imagining the world differently?
And who will have access to those places?
Natalija Vujošević,
Podgorica, Montenegro
About the Non-Aligned Constellations Working Group
Grounded in the concept of ‘constellations’ and derived from the Southern Constellations exhibition series (launched in 2019 at Moderna galerija, Ljubljana, Slovenia), this research explores the intersection of art, history, and geography, with a particular focus on the global relationships fostered through the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). The project investigates the legacy of the Gallery of Art of the Non-Aligned Countries Josip Broz Tito (Titograd, 1981–1995), whose collection, comprising 800 works from 56 NAM countries, is now housed at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Montenegro. Curators Angelina Radaković, Bojana Piškur, and Natalija Vujošević (the initiator of the Art Collection of Non-Aligned Countries Laboratory project at MSUCG) aim to revive the collection through participatory, experimental, and interdisciplinary methods. By engaging with its historical and political context, they seek to reestablish connections with cultural actors from the Global South. Tracing the exchanges of solidarity, this project will reframe the artworks, offering new perspectives on the cultural and political dialogues that shaped both the past and present.
Natalija Vujošević is a curator, researcher and cultural organiser based in Montenegro. Her work is particularly concerned with Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav cultural and political histories and with the relationships between historical material, institutional memory, and contemporary conditions. In 2024, she received the Igor Zabel Grant, awarded in recognition of outstanding achievements by curators, art historians, theorists, writers, and critics working in the field of visual.
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