Nataša Jagdhuhn

Research Area 4

Stay at EEGA: February – July 2020

Research topic: Collecting and Exhibiting Nonalignment: The Gallery of Art of the Non-Aligned Countries “Josip Broz Tito”

Dr. Nataša Jagdhuhn has defended her PhD thesis „Broken Museality: Reframing World War II Heritage in the Post-Yugoslav Transition“ in January 2020 at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena in the field „Southeastern European Studies“.

During her stay at EEGA, Jagdhuhn will concentrate on her Research Project on Collecting and Exhibiting Nonalignment in Yugoslavia.
The effects of the Non-Aligned Movement (henceforth, NAM) on global politics during the Cold War are well researched in political and social science. However, from a museological perspective those effects are by no means obvious. Museological debates coined in and by the cross-continental network of NAM countries remained invisible within both the western and global academic realm.
This research project starts from the premise that to fully understand the causes of the post-1989 museal turn, it is necessary to place the development of museology as an academic discipline during the Cold War in a wider global context, one which includes not exclusively East-West rivalry, but also the world’s multiple Souths. It will demonstrate, by examining the case study of the Gallery for the Art of the Non-Aligned Countries in Titograd (present-day Podgorica), that the NAM’s cultural politics raised the idea of decolonization in museum theory and practice, thereby establishing a third voice in the development of museology discourse.