Center for Queer Studies Presents

Pride Queer Studies 2024 within Pride Week

Under the slogan:

IT'S PRETTIER WITH QUEER CULTURE!

Location and Time:

Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, Kraljice Natalije 45, 4th floor

Wednesday, September 4, from 1:00 PM to 4:00 PM

Lectures and Discussions Following the Lectures:

VISUAL IDENTITY OF BEAR CULTURE

from 1:00 PM to 2:30 PM

Drawing from art history and fashion studies, the lecture highlights the iconographic and semiotic aspects in the (re)presentation of a queer culture. As a masculine homosexual – and homonormative – culture, Bear* culture has developed specific visual communication codes, relying on carefully curated bodily attributes, material culture, and especially clothing items. The question that the lecture aims to pose is: How visually fragile or stable is the (queer) identity of Bear culture, and through which mechanisms and visual codes do we liberate, restrict, and create a (queer) culture?

Stefan Žarić is a fashion historian and Fulbright scholar at the University of Massachusetts, where he is pursuing a Ph.D. on the history of fashion and Shakespeare’s tragedies. He curated the first high-fashion exhibition in Serbia, the Jean-Paul Gaultier exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade, and has honed his expertise in fashion history and museology in the USA, Japan, the UK, and Estonia. He writes fashion history essays for ELLE magazine.

*(roughly: larger, hairier man of bi/gay orientation)

APPROXIMATELY ON OTOGRYPHISM, AN ARTISTIC MOVEMENT BEYOND (THE SYSTEM OF) ART

from 2:30 PM to 4:00 PM

This lecture will explore the poetics and practice of an un-institutionalized artistic movement called otogryphism, through the lens of queer politics and aesthetics. The presentation will establish an analogy between heteronormativity and all other queer gender-sexual statuses (yesterday) and (the system of) contemporary art and otogryphism (today). By presenting five chapters from the evolving manifesto-monograph of otogryphism, the position of otogryphism in the current social and cultural context will be examined. Emphasis will be placed on the differences between this artistic movement and market vulgarization, political confiscation, aesthetic incoherence, institutional opportunism, semantic trivialization, and the excessive biographism of contemporary art (as some of the prevailing tendencies).

Otogryph-šešmin in the form of a "disoriented" crucifix and a measuring tape for gauging powerlessness (of choice). The inscription reads: CHOOSE POWERLESSNESS ACCORDING TO YOUR MEASURE, otogryph-šešmin (wood, rubber), 14 x 14 cm, 2013.

Dušica Popović is an art historian who engages in discouraging non-thinking (in art).