Discussing the Past or Airing the Depots: Refashioning Exhibitions of Socialism in Serbia

Abstract

This chapter examines how the representational museum politics creates a system of meanings by defining socialism as the “other” in opposition to which the new collective identity is in a process of constant reconstruction after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Focusing on the work of one specific museum institution—the Museum of Yugoslavia, known as the Museum of Yugoslav History until 2016—we discuss a process of revalorizing socialism, communism, and Yugoslavia in present-day Serbia. We place the work of this specific museum in the wider institutional, historical, and artistic network of socialist Yugoslavia and contemporary Serbia.