September 14 - October 5, 2006 (opening at 7 p.m.)
Museum of Contemporary Art Novi Sad, Dunavska 37
http://www.msluns.org.yu/izlozbe/2006/zvezda/2006-zvezda.html
A star and its shadow
Iconographic representations of the five-pointed star in the art
socialist and post-socialist society:
Ideologies, utopias, simulacra of freedom 1945 - 2005.
Authors and curator of the exhibition: Nebojsa Milenkovic
The exhibition Star and Its Shadow, with more than 30 artists, deals with iconographic representations of the five-pointed star as an ideological, religious, sociological and marketing symbol in the art and culture of the Yugoslav and Serbian socialist and post-socialist society of the second half of the XX and early XXI century. It is an attempt to identify complex cause-and-effect relationships between ideological matrices and models on the one hand, and popular culture and high art on the other. All this is happening in the specific socio-political and geographical environment of the so-called real socialism of Tito's Yugoslavia, that is, the independent states that emerged after its disintegration. In this context, the iconographic model/symbol/representation was chosen as the starting point in an attempt to unravel the complex interrelationships of art and ruling ideology in the SFRY from the end of World War II to the death of President Josip Broz Tito in 1980 - just like after Tito death, wars and the final disintegration of a country that lived in its shadow. By sliding the sign, the meaning and the signified in post-communist Serbia, we are talking about the influence of politics (ideology) in the sphere of mass, popular culture - all in the context of the energy of social change and the new transitional reality at the beginning of the new millennium. Equally, about the collapse and shedding of that energy in the time after the assassination of the first democratic prime minister of Serbia, Zoran Djindjic, in 2003.