In 2020, the Museum of Yugoslavia launched the project Political Graffiti about Yugoslavia in the (Post)Socialist Era, aiming to interrogate how memories of Yugoslavia are (re)articulated through the discourse of political graffiti in the aftermath of the country’s dissolution.

From the museum’s perspective, the initiative holds particular significance in developing methodologies for museum work with ephemeral materials—such as graffiti—that are inherently vulnerable to erasure and forgetting. It also marked an important step in activating the testimonial potential of such materials and in expanding a network of collaborators focused on (post-)Yugoslav heritage.

As part of the project, a team of researchers conducted fieldwork across former Yugoslav territories, documenting several thousand graffiti pieces that engage—whether affirmatively or critically—with Yugoslav legacies. These images, along with selected private archives, provided the foundation for the newly released bilingual volume Political Graffiti about Yugoslavia in the Socialist and Postsocialist Eras, edited by Mitja Velikonja, Marija Đorgović, and Simona Ognjanović.

The publication, which was recently released by the Museum of Yugoslavia in both English and Serbian, has been nominated for the ICOM Serbia Publication of the Year Award by the International Council of Museums (ICOM).
👉 View nomination post

To mark the release, visual artist Katarina Popović carried out a striking artistic intervention: on the back cover of each copy in the print run, she spray-painted the word MIR (meaning “peace”) in both Latin and Cyrillic script using red paint.
📷 View artwork

The volume includes seven scholarly essays by Nevena Škrbić Alempijević, Helena Konda, Eric Ušić, Gregor Bulc, Jasmin Hasanović, Vjeran Pavlaković, and Slobodan Karamanić & Daniel Šuber, alongside five interviews with artists and researchers whose work engages with historical and contemporary graffiti: Boris Cvjetanović, Igor Grubić, Slobodan Karamanić & Daniel Šuber, Nemanja Cvijanović, Igor Bezinović, and Ana Jurčić.

Together, these texts open up key debates around:

• The methodological challenges of archiving, museumization, and institutionalization of graffiti;
• The potential for protecting or reconstructing significant examples of political graffiti practice;
• The discursive functions of contemporary graffiti referencing Yugoslav heritage within present-day ideological struggles;
• And the status and meaning of graffiti from the socialist period today.

As part of the project, the Museum also curated a mini-exhibition on political graffiti in Istria within its permanent collection, alongside a public conversation on the topic.