Re-Thinking Architectural Modernism in Contemporary Art: Jasmina Cibic, Dušica Dražić and Katarina Burin

Sonja Jankov

doi:10.25038/am.v0i16.256

Abstract

This paper analyses how three contemporary female artists approach Modernist architecture and its ideological context. Jasmina Cibic in her contemporary interdisciplinary installations addresses politization of architecture – both at the time it was conceptualised and now, when it is related to past political regimes. For Cibic, architectural objects are signifiers of larger narratives. This is how she approaches Slovenian trade fair that was supposed to be realised in 1941, but has never been, numerous renovations of the former summer residency of Yugoslav president Josip Broz Tito, lack of documentation on the Pavilion of Kingdom of Yugoslavia at the 1929 World Expo and the Palace of Yugoslav Federal Executive Council. In the case of Dušica Dražić, the paper focuses on her work New City, a large maquette of a non-existing city that contains buildings chosen from projects that were actually built but eventually destroyed. Katarina Burin fabricates sketches, documentary materials, architectural scale models, technical drawings and furnishings which are aesthetically, technically and theoretically bounded to the architectural design of the 1950s, in order to create Gesamtkunstwerk which criticizes the absence of women from architectural history of the time.  Article received: March 24, 2018; Article accepted: April 10, 2018; Published online: September 15, 2018; Preliminary report – Short Communications How to cite this article: Jankov, Sonja. "Re-Thinking Architectural Modernism in Contemporary Art: Jasmina Cibic, Dušica Dražić and Katarina Burin." AM Journal of Art and Media Studies 16 (2018): 85−98. doi: 10.25038/am.v0i16.256

Highlights

This paper analyses how three contemporary female artists approach Modernist architecture and its ideological context
Starting from semiotic studies of a sign and communication, Jencks defined “‘formemes, funcemas and techemes’ – those fundamental units of architectural meaning.”1 But he soon highlighted that one cannot stop at the three traditional terms of architecture, since the “meaning of a word or sign is determined by all the matrices of which it is a part.”2 Late Modernist architecture was firstly part and product of the economic depression caused by WWII, which had nuclear apotheosis, and ideologies that built the new post-war world after massive destruction
This paper is a discursive analysis of selected gallery works by Jasmina Cibic, Dušica Dražić and Katarina Burin, three contemporary artists who integrate changed meanings of architecture into their works

Summary

Introduction

This paper analyses how three contemporary female artists approach Modernist architecture and its ideological context. Re-Thinking Architectural Modernism in Contemporary Art: Jasmina Cibic, Dušica Dražić and Katarina Burin In the case of Dušica Dražić, the paper focuses on her work New City, a large maquette of a non-existing city that contains buildings chosen from projects that were built but eventually destroyed.

Results

Conclusion