The lecture will discuss the aesthetic and discursive limits of socialist modernism by focusing on architecture in Yugoslavia between 1950 and 1980. It will present Vjenceslav Richter's neo-avant-garde work and Bogdan Bogdanović's Surrealist-inspired war memorials as different manifestations of the surviving leftist culture from the prewar period.
Vladimir Kulić holds a Ph.D. from the University of Texas in Austin and teaches architectural history and theory at Florida Atlantic University. His publications include Modernism In-Between: The Mediatory Architectures of Socialist Yugoslavia (with Wolfgang Thaler and Maroje Mrduljaš, 2012), Unfinished Modernisations (edited with Maroje Mrduljaš, 2012), and Sanctioning Modernism: Architecture and the Making of Postwar Identities (edited with Monica Penick and Timothy Parker, forthcoming 2014). He is the current ACLS-NEH International and Area Studies Fellow and a Visiting Scholar at the Heyman Center for the Humanities.
