Women and Partisan Art

The resistance by partisan women in Yugoslavia and Carinthia (Austria), and particularly their artistic production, have not been acknowledged in the historical accounts of World War II. Their art was both a form of resistance and a culturally subversive practice, ranging from avant-garde aesthetics to traditional forms of folk art and handicraft. The cultural production by and subsequently about the Yugoslav and Carinthian women partisans includes literature, visual arts, film, photography, comics, textiles, press, theater, dance, and monument architecture. The contributors to this volume present this groundbreaking research to mark eighty years since the victory over Nazism and Fascism in Europe.

Elena Messner is an author, scholar, and a senior postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Slavic Studies at Universität Wien, with a project on feminist periodicals from ex-Yugoslavia. She is also a lecturer in Slavic literatures at the Department of Slavic Studies at Universität Klagenfurt. Her research interests include (post-)Yugoslav literature, art and periodicals, feminist theory, translation and reception theory as well as the cultural heritage of the Yugoslav resistance movement.

Cristina Beretta is an associate professor of Slavic literatures at the Institute of Slavic Studies at Universität Klagenfurt. Her research interests include post-Yugoslav war literature with a focus on nationalism and agency, gender- and queer studies in Russian and in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian/Montenegrin literatures with a focus on gender norms, cross-border studies, and Alps-Adriatic studies.

Goran Lazičić holds a PhD in Slavic studies and is a lecturer in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian literatures and cultures at Universität Graz and Universität Klagenfurt. His research interests include Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav literature and film, satire, comedy and subversion in literature and art, and nostalgia, paranoia, and conspiracy theories in post-socialist contexts.

Markus Gönitzer is a cultural worker and curator of public discussions of social policy and politics. Since 2021 he has been a member of the board and artistic directorate of Forum Stadtpark, a production and presentation space for contemporary art in Graz. He is chairman of Verein/Društvo Peršman, the association responsible for the pedagogical and scientific curation of the Peršmanhof Museum. His main fields of work include culture(s) of remembrance, theories of utopia and transformation, as well as art and cultural initiatives as vehicles of social change.