Tanja Marković
Tanja Marković (1970) is a psychologist, artist and political activist from Belgrade, Serbia. She is a member of the feminist anti-fascist collective Women in Black. She places her work in the intersection of art, activism and research with an emphasis on politics. In the field of visual arts, she was engaged in performance and installation. She exhibited in Belgrade, Timișoara, San Diego and Vienna. She moderated a series of panels mostly on engaged art. She is a member of the Association of Fine Artists of Serbia. She is one of the founders of the Center for Queer Studies. She was the vice-president of the Union of Anti-Fascists of Serbia. She is a member of Rainbow of Desire collective, based in Croatia, which experiments with Augusto Boal’s techniques that help us`see' for the first time the oppressions we have internalised.
Session
This presentation shows the work of the women's peace anti-militaristic and anti-fascist collective Women in Black from Belgrade (Serbia), with a focus on the activities of creating archive of this group. I will analyse how feminists opposed politics of militarism and nationalism, during the past 30 years, working on constant alarming the Serbian society, but also on permanent peace education. The continuous archiving of texts, videos and photographs from every street action, every visit to the place of a crime, every workshop or meeting of the Women in Black network, as well as writing appeals, announcements, reports and books, have built a network of alternative knowledge. In the introduction to her book Agnostic Mourning - Political Dissidence and the Women in Black, Athena Athanasiou says about this group: "They all never tired of letting me know that their collective and dissident mal d'archive was all worth it.” The presentation will discuss how to build a movement of all those whose voice remains on the margins of a society that will not take responsibility for war and crimes? How violence from the battlefield spills over into post-war society? How can the feminist movement fight peacefully against the militarism with the help of art collectives and related activist groups? These and numerous similar questions will be answered through the presentation of the activities from the Women in Black archive.
Image: 20th anniversary of Women in Black, Republic Square, Belgrade, Serbia, 2011