Anja Foerschner’s Female Art and Agency in Yugoslavia, 1971–2001 joins a growing body of literature on art in the former Yugoslavia, a body of research that has demonstrated not only the diverse approaches of artists working across the five socialist republics and the two autonomous provinces of the country, but also the significance of their artistic strategies for a robust understanding of postwar art history. Foerschner turns the reader’s attention to the activity and impact of women artists and curators in Yugoslavia, with a particular focus on those working in what—in the Yugoslav context—was referred to as the New Art Practice: fields such as performance, conceptualism, video, and new media art. These approaches became particularly dynamic in the 1970s, when Foerschner’s study begins. The book is organized into an introduction, four chapters, and a coda, with each of the four core chapters examining a particular type of practice: curatorial endeavors, performance, video, and “social activism and political art,” a category that feels much more amorphously defined than the preceding three (111–13). Exploring a thirty-year period, Foerschner shows the consistent and innovative contributions Yugoslav women made to evolving understandings of what art could be and do, and how women artists—with both their actions and their bodies—could impact society.

Yugoslav artists such as Marina Abramović, Sanja Iveković, and Tanja Ostojić are now fairly well known and often discussed in histories of postwar art, but Foerschner’s book does not examine these figures in depth. Instead, it aims to shed light on relatively lesser-known women like Dunja Blažević, Katalin Ladik, Bogdanka Poznanović, and Žaneta Vangeli. Perhaps more significantly, the book underlines women’s impact on the Yugoslav art scene more holistically: examining women’s roles as institutional founders, educators, and organizers, and not simply as artists producing artworks. For example, Foerschner begins the book’s first chapter by exploring the work done by Dunja Blažević, Biljana Tomić, and Jasna Tijardović as curators and gallery directors associated with Belgrade’s Student Cultural Center (SKC), opened in 1971. The Student Cultural Centers, established in several major cities across Yugoslavia, were an important network of cultural institutions that served as sites for the development of the alternative, conceptual, and sometimes markedly political actions of the New Art Practice, and Foerschner emphasizes that the innovative exhibition forms, performances, and artistic tactics developed in these spaces often stemmed from the women who managed them. Later, in her discussion of Bogdanka Poznanović, an important pioneer of video art, Foerschner highlights Poznanović as one of the founders of the Tribina Mladih (Youth Tribune) in Novi Sad (established in 1954). She explores Poznanović’s work as an editor for the organization’s publication Fields and as the Tribune’s director of exhibitions, as well as her later teaching in the Novi Sad Academy of Fine Arts, alongside her artistic practice, showing how her exploration of video was shaped by and in turn informed the other roles she played in the art world (86–98). This emphasis on women’s multifaceted contributions is one of the strengths of the book.

Foerschner’s study will immediately draw comparison to the recent volume by Jasmina Tumbas, “I Am Jugoslovenka!” Feminist Performance Politics During and After Yugoslav Socialism (2022), which examines many of the same artists and issues, but through an explicitly feminist lens that foregrounds emancipation and performance. In terms of the media and practices examined, Foerschner casts a wider net, and her approach to (Yugoslav) feminism is different; she maps out a brief history of feminism in the country, but ultimately eschews it as a framing concept (6–9), opting instead to allow the broader umbrella of female identity and the more neutral concept of “agency” to guide her. This framing sometimes yields uneven results, however, and Foerschner’s stated goal of “fill[ing] some of the gaps” (14) in patriarchal art histories sometimes produces meandering analyses that try to touch on the work of numerous different artists, without establishing unifying grounds for understanding the impact of their work and approaches. This is particularly the case in the book’s fourth chapter, on activism and political art, in which it is not always clear whether Foerschner sees politics as simply another kind of artistic content or wishes to emphasize how women pursued the political as a particular form of art-making. Ultimately, however, the value of Foerschner’s study is precisely in the variety of artists she discusses, definitively demonstrating the vitality of women’s experimental approaches to art not only in the context of Yugoslavia, but more broadly as part of the global neo-avant-garde.