Deadline: 4 May 2025
A pub quiz question in a small town on the Croatian coast asked: “Which of the three fathers of the Non-Aligned Movement does NOT have a square named after them in Zagreb?”[1] (Un)Surprisingly, it is Yugoslav communist politician Josip Broz Tito whose name is omitted. Following the fall of Yugoslavia, former Yugoslav states scrambled to erase any trace of their shared socialist past as they built individual neoliberal nation-state projects. However, they have been more hesitant to bury the Yugoslav flagship foreign policy of Non-Alignment — both because it risks damaging current foreign relations with those countries and because it is tempting for politicians and institutions to use whatever remains of the international cachet Non-Alignment had brought with it. This raises the question: is there a way to genuinely re-engage and re-build these international networks?
In her foreword to the catalogue of the group exhibition Southern Constellations: The Poetics of the Non-Aligned (Moderna Galerija, Ljubljana, 2019), curator and art critic Zdenka Badovinac responds to the question of why concepts related to the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) have seen a significant resurgence in art recently. She writes that, “in this time of increasing global inequalities, crises, and the widening chasm between the rich and the poor, artists are seeking new ways and means of expression with which to overcome such divisions and perhaps re-establish different, more just global relations.”[2] How can these concepts be reinterpreted and still apply to the present?
The upcoming issue of Kunstlicht, dedicated to political non-alignment and the aesthetics of non-alignment, asks: How are contemporary artists and art practitioners engaging with an imaginary of the NAM today? How is the domain of contemporary art contributing to the materialisation of non-aligned worldmaking aspirations? And how can modern-day contemporary art practices and modes of collaboration within art and culture be read in the context of the NAM and non-alignment more generally?
The Non-Aligned Movement was formally established at the Belgrade Conference of 1961 amidst a global wave of decolonisation following the end of the Second World War, and the unfolding Cold War. At least on paper, it put forward an alternative model of globalisation based on decolonial solidarity, the promotion of peaceful coexistence (including disarmament and nuclear nonproliferation), and the refusal to serve the interests or become overly dependent on one of the two superpowers: the capitalist US on the West and the communist USSR on the East. As such, it was an ambitious geopolitical project engaged with challenging the idea of a (bi)polarised world. This new approach was reflected in the NAM’s organisational structure, which was non-hierarchical and rotational, and without an enshrined secretariat or constitution.[3]
The official foundation of the NAM in 1961 was a result of preceding discussions and friendly relations between (later) NAM member countries, most notably the Afro-Asian Conference held in Bandung in 1955. By the end of the conference, the 29 attending countries from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East had agreed on a set of core principles and concrete objectives in relation to political sovereignty, economic and cultural cooperation, and the potential of collaboration among newly or not-yet independent countries.[4] The 1956 Brioni Meeting, led the following year by Jawaharlal Nehru (India), Josip Broz Tito (Yugoslavia), Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana), Gamal Abdel Nasser (Egypt) and Sukarno (Indonesia), further paved the way for the NAM’s formation five years later.
Over time, the NAM’s configuration and its sphere of impact shifted along with member countries’ political and economic priorities, and developments on the world stage. Although the NAM continues to exist as a forum of 121 countries, following its decline starting towards the end of the 1970s, non-alignment primarily lives on arguably as an aspirational set of ideals that speak to a current desire for other political, economic, and social imaginaries and formations, a desire that is also being widely expressed by and explored in the domain of contemporary art.
documenta 15 and its curation according to lumbung principles by the Indonesian artist-curatorial collective ruangrupa comes to mind as a clear example of a Global-Southern perspective on how artistic and curatorial practice can actively serve to set up international structures of solidarity that bypass Western hegemonic models. The contribution of the collective Fehras Publishing Practices to documenta 15 under the title Borrowed Faces explored the publishing practice of the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Movement (established during the 1955 Bandung Conference) in order to “retell these histories through a prism that speaks to our current reality in all its socio-political contradictions.”[5]
In addition, the NAM as a (geo)political project actualised itself and achieved its goals partly through various modes of cultural collaborations, exchanges, and artistic diplomacy among member countries.[6] In line with the de-/anti-colonial values engendered by the Movement, cultural collaboration was based on principles of cultural equality, diversity and hybridity, new kinds of historicisation, and questioning epistemic colonialism and cultural dependency.[7] As an example, in 1985, the Gallery for the Art of the Non-Aligned Countries was founded in then-Titograd (modern-day Podgorica, capital city of Montenegro) as a cultural-diplomatic project aiming to collect, preserve and exhibit art from non-aligned countries. A number of works from this collection were recently revived into the collective contemporary artistic conscience by being included in the Montenegran Pavilion at the 59th Venice Art Biennale (2022) as part of a “sci-fi tale of possible futures.”
Particularly between the 1960s and 1980s, Yugoslav architects were commissioned on numerous occasions to realise Socialist Modernist building projects across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, resulting in a unique architectural aesthetic combining elements from socialist and international modernism.[8] An example of such artistic and architectural exchange between Ethiopia and Yugoslavia is the Yekatit 12 Monument in Addis Ababa. This commemorative sculpture represented the occupation by Italian forces, under which both countries had suffered, as well as the friendship between the nations.[9]
Furthermore, the exhibition of Contemporary Art of the Non-Aligned Countries: Unity in Diversity in Non-Aligned Art that took place in Jakarta in 1995 is an instance of how visual art served as a means to foster a deeper understanding and friendship among over 40 participating member countries, and develop an alternative notion of temporality emanating from the ‘Global South’.[10]
Closer to our time, the archival and documentary exhibition Past Disquiet (Framer Framed, Amsterdam, on view until May 25, 2025) is based on curators’ Kristine Khouri and Rasha Salti’s research into the International Art Exhibition for Palestine, which was held in 1978 in Beirut as a political gesture of support for an independent state for Palestine and the creation of a national museum. The 1978 exhibition was an initiative of the Palestine Liberation Organization and, in the beginning, mostly based on pan-Arab mobilisation.[11] Khouri and Salti’s research into the exhibition uncovered a history of grassroots artists’ collectives and artists’ unions throughout the world which was based on political affiliations, solidarities, and cultural exchange that were similar to those of the NAM.[12]
We invite scholars, writers, artists, and creative or cultural practitioners from all stages in their respective practices, to submit ideas for articles, reviews, visual works, or other forms of contributions that are compatible with the printed form, to consider rediscovering historical events, aesthetic objects, and other Non-Aligned artistic and cultural practices in order to explore their relation or contribution to the political project of Non-Alignment, and their effectiveness, shortcomings and the problematics they embodied or pose(d).
We are interested in exploring questions of: What are the living legacies of Non-Alignment? What does/could non-alignment mean in our current political climates? (How) Can non-alignment, both as a movement emerging from a specific historical context and as a concept that possibly exceeds it, help us conceive of alternative forms of political existence, resistance, and liberation rooted in solidarity and friendship, including those made possible through artistic and cultural praxis? And what are some examples of present-day aesthetic expressions and practices that can be considered activations of unfulfilled non-aligned visions and aspirations?
We look forward to receiving your submissions together with your CV or portfolio by not later than May 4, 2025. For academic articles and written pieces, we invite you to submit an abstract of not more than 300 words. For visual or other more experimental submissions, we invite you to submit a proposal that does not exceed 1 A4 page. You can send in your proposed contribution to redactie@tijdschriftkunstlicht.nl using ‘Aesthetics of Non-Alignment’ as the subject line. All writers and contributors will be notified about the selection process before the end of the month. The issue will be published towards the end of 2025.
[1] The ‘three fathers’ would be: Jawaharlal Nehru of India, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, and Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia.
[2] Zdenka Badovinac, “Foreword,” in Southern Constellations: The Poetics of the Non-Aligned (Moderna Galerija, 2019), 5.
[3] Nuclear Threat Initiative, “Non-Aligned Movement (NAM),” NTI, accessed March 22, 2025, https://www.nti.org/education-center/treaties-and-regimes/non-aligned-movement-nam/.
[4] Su Lin Lewis, “Decolonising the History of Internationalism: Transnational Activism across the South,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 2 (2024): 355.
[5] Fehras Publishing Practices, “Borrowed Faces issue no. 2,” accessed March 22, 2025, https://fehraspublishingpractices.org/filter/Events/Borrowed-Faces-issue-no-2-documenta-fifteen.
[6] Examples include conventions, exchanges of artworks, exhibitions, and mobility programmes, for instance in the fields of architecture and education.
[7] Bojana Piškur, “Southern Constellations: Other Histories, Other Modernities,” in Southern Constellations: The Poetics of the Non-Aligned (Moderna Galerija, 2019), 14.
[8] This combination resulted in a certain type of “tropical modernism,” an architectural style that was attentive to local contexts, in: Piškur, “Southern Constellations,” 14; A timeline of activity for Energoprojekt, one of the most prominent Yugoslav architecture firms, can be found here: Energoprojekt Holding plc., ed., Energoprojekt: 60 Years of Success (Belgrade, Serbia: Energoprojekt Holding plc., 2011), https://www.ephydro.com/about/downloads/ep-group/ep-60-years-of-success.pdf.
[9] Bojana Videkanić, Nonaligned Modernism: Socialist Postcolonial Aesthetics in Yugoslavia, 1945-1985 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019), 155.
[10] Piškur, “Southern Constellations,” 17.
[11] Kristine Khouri and Rasha Salti, “Introducing Past Disquiet,” in Past Disquiet: Artists, International Solidarity and Museums in Exile (Museum of Modern Art Warsaw, 2018), 20.
[12] Anselm Franke, “Introducing Past Disquiet,” in Past Disquiet: Artists, International Solidarity and Museums in Exile, ed. Kristine Khouri and Rasha Salti (Museum of Modern Art Warsaw, 2018), 16.