Jelena Petrović appointed for Endowed Professorship for Central and South Eastern European Art Histories

The Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and ERSTE Foundation announce the appointment of Jelena Petrović as Endowed Professor for Central and South Eastern European Art Histories at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Austria. The Endowed Professorship was advertised by the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in cooperation with ERSTE Foundation 2013 for the first time, and with Suzana Milevska the Academy has been able to employ an excellent figure in the field for the first two-year term (September 2013-May 2015) of the professorship. The Professorship is addressed to scientists with outstanding scientific qualifications in the field of Central and South Eastern European Art Histories, giving particular consideration to the period after 1960. In terms of an extended concept of Art History the Professorship position is designed to interrelate with other fields of Art History, particularly the critical reflection of economic, political, cultural and queer-feminist context as well as postcolonial theory formations and institutional critique. Devised as a series of guest professorships with work contracts for two years each, this project seeks to bring different scholars with diverse backgrounds to the Academy to ensure that this vast research field may be covered as widely as possible over the years.

The Academy of Fine Arts Vienna is happy to welcome a well-known and profound expert in the field of Central and South Eastern European Art:

Jelena Petrović is a feminist scholar, cultural theorist and art-worker. She is (co)author of many articles, event and cross-disciplinary projects related to post/Yugoslav issues - particularly to mis/interpretative models of (post)Yugoslav history, memory, culture, art-theory and feminism, working on new epistemological models of knowledge production.
She completed her BA degree at the Faculty of Philology, University of Belgrade in Serbia, and her PhD studies at the Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis - ISH, Ljubljana Graduate School of Humanities in Slovenia. Until 2014, she was affiliated with the postgraduate program at the ISH as an assistant professor in humanities and with several faculties in the region as guest lecturer. In parallel she was a member of the art-theory group Grupa Spomenik/The Monument Group active in the broadly conceived fields of art practice and theory, dealing with (im)possiblilty to produce a political space to enable a discussion on wars of the 1990s and the existence of the post-war collectivities in the region.

Petrović is co-founder and member of a feminist curatorial group Red Min(e)d dealing with the relation of contemporary art and feminism in the post-Yugoslav space (since 2011). She founded MINA, Institute for Socially Engaged Art and Theory in Ljubljana (2009), as platform for cooperative art-theory practices, which is also a co-organisational background for the Red Min(e)d long-term project The Living Archive and other informal and collective projects grounded in the political (feminist) friendship and art-theory work.

At the moment, she is teaching about feminist curating and contemporary art practices at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, University of Ljubljana. Her main areas of interest are: emancipatory politics of knowledge production, politics of memory, politics of love/community and friendship, (post)Yugoslav feminism and art-theory practices, (non)work and (non)family politics, social imagination/utopia and political articulation of possible futures.

Selected publications & contributions

Co-editor/co-author of:

No One Belongs Here More Than You. The Living Archive: Curating Feminist Knowledge , 54th October Salon, eds. Red Min(e)d and Jelena Vesić, Cultural Center Belgrade, Cicero Belgrade 2014.

Feminist Critical Interventions, Thinking Heritage, Decolonising, Crossings eds. Biljana Kašić, Jelena Petrović, Sandra Prlenda and Svetlana Slapšak, RAUP, Red Athena University Press, Zagreb 2013.

Feminism - Politics of Equality for All and Yugoslav Feminism(s) , eds. Jelena Petrović and Damir Arsenijević, 2 special volumes of ProFemina, Journal of Women Writings and Culture ProFemina, Belgrade 2011.

Gender, Literature and Cultural Memory in the Post-Yugoslav Space , eds. By Damir Arsenijević, Katja Kobolt, Jelena Petrović, Tanja Velagić, City of Women : Borec ZAK : Institute Mina, Ljubljana, 2010.

Author of:

Politics of Love and Struggle. Theoretical Insights and Political Voices of Yugoslav Feminism Between Two World Wars (forthcoming 2015)