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Since their childhood, Teodora and her sister Boryana witnessed the activity of their mother, "who has always provoked the disapproval of the socialist power. As a teacher, screenwriter and theater director, Sevdalina Panayotova, for half of a century, created scenarios and plays that were stopped and obstructed by the institutions, but which raised generations of courage, civic position, activity and anti-communist thinking."

Teodora explains her anticommunist beliefs by the characteristics of the totalitarian regime: "To enforce and to survive, the regime systematically and purposefully destroyed the basic moral norms and transformed the amoral behavior into normality: murder, lawlessness, betrayal, slander, lying, duplicity, falsification, corruption etc. At the same time, the regime held the population subject to fear and terror, which turned paranoia into a constantly mental state, destroying trust among people. And trust is the foundation of every society."

Having beeing parent herself in non-fear and non-obedience, Teodora Panayotova maintains that "the claim that there was no resistance in Bulgaria against the communist regime, comparing it with the 1956 Hungarian uprising, the Czech 1968 revolution and the Polish resistance 1981, is not true. In the first years after 9.IX.1944 there was the so-called Goryanstvo movement. These were militarized bands who fought against the communist regime and who were killed in very cruel way. Periodically in Bulgaria there were groups and individuals who have been against the communist regime, and who therefore spend years in forced labour camps or in prisons, or have been objects of dismissal, interrogations and other repressive measures; or forced to emigrate. One such group was also around Sevdalina Panayotova, whose collection we are presenting."

Her understanding of cultural opposition Teodora Panayotova expresses as follows: "Cultural opposition is an opposition through the means of culture in the narrow sense of the word, i.e. through the forms of art (verbal and non-verbal, of written and oral speech, which includes education). During the 45 years of socialist Bulgaria there was a cultural opposition, which is less expressed in works (written, paintings, sculptures, theatrical and musical) directed openly against the totalitarian power, but more in getting out from the established interpretation of works and breaking the pattern of socialist realism."

His work changed during the 1990s for a number of reasons. On the local level the country was at war, on the global level a transformation was underway towards embracing new technologies. In his own words “this new environment led me to question my acquired knowledge and in relation to that and the economic crisis in Serbia, I saw the strengthening of my personal feelings and relationship toward immaterial art as my initiation, precisely through the local neo-avantgarde and avantgarde.”

He was active in the Apsolutno art collective from its inception in 1993 until 2005. The collective focused on new technologies, traditional art projects and video installations. In the second half of the 1990s, through artist residencies abroad, he acquired an insight into international events and contemporary social and cultural challenges in Europe. The political shift on 5 October 2000 – when the presidency of Slobodan Milošević was ended by mass demonstrations of Democratic Opposition of Serbia supporters – pointed to the needs and problems in art production that reacts to and yet is not rooted in the infrastructure and politics of culture, where it could interface with societal relations.

After acquiring experience abroad and learning about organizational models, in 2001, together with other members, he established New Media Center_kuda.org with a space with permanent infrastructure, where people could gather, share ideas and information and collaborate. This became the basis for new artistic production, a hub, an archive and a library. The mission of kuda.org is to organize artist-activists who challenge the use of new technologies in art and society and to create a platform for the critical analysis of technology and society.

Žarana Papić is remembered as one of the pioneers of Yugoslav feminism. She set high standards in theory and in activism, struggling for a more equal and fairer society.

As a trained sociologist, Žarana first encountered contemporary feminist theory at the Croatian Sociological Society conference in Portorož in 1976. In the same year, she attended the first course of Women’s Studies organized at the Inter-University Center Dubrovnik. Together with other colleagues, she organized the first international feminist conference in Eastern Europe in October 1978 in Belgrade’s Student Cultural Center (SKC). At this conference feminists from countries like England, Germany, France and Poland were invited for the first time, which also provided the opportunity for exchange with Yugoslav feminists.

The conference was titled: Drug-ca žensko pitanje, novi pristup? [Comrade woman. Women’s question- A new approach?] This conference represented a new feminist movement and theory, which was driven by hosting renowned participants from around Europe. The conference critically examined the dominant patriarchic system, and enabled the founding of a group of feminist-oriented theoreticians and activists in Yugoslavia. The conference signaled the beginning of a feminist critique of patriarchy in socialism.

Starting in 1977, Žarana Papić published articles on the subject of women’s issues. Together with Lydia Sklevicky from Zagreb, she edited the book Antropologija žene [Anthropology of Women] (1983), the first of its kind in Yugoslavia. The book inspired many young women to engage with this topic. In 1989, Žarana became an assistant in social anthropology at the Department of Sociology. She completed her doctorate degree with the thesis: “Dijalektika pola i roda - priroda i kultura u savremenoj socijalnoj antropologiji” [The dialectics of sex and gender - nature and culture in contemporary social anthropology] and earned the position of assistant professor at the same department. Žarana regularly taught social and cultural anthropology and gender studies as a special subject. In 1997 her doctorate was published under the title “Polnost i kultura: telo i znanje u savremnoj antropologiji” [Gender and Culture: Body and Knowledge in Contemporary Anthropology].

Žarana Papić belonged to the first post-war generation of Yugoslav feminists and had a huge influence on the development of younger generations.

Neša Paripović was born in 1942 in Belgrade. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade in 1969, and studied in the master class of Krsto Hegedušić in Zagreb from 1971 to 1973. He collaborated with the Group of Six Artists that gathered at the gallery of the Student Cultural Centre between 1971 and 1973. From 1975 to 1980, he worked with Group 143, which was dedicated to the linguistic and semiotic exploration of art. From 1991, he was a member of the theatre ensemble of Belgrade’s Dah Teater. He has shown his work at numerous group exhibitions in Yugoslavia, Serbia and abroad.  

Pioneer of Polish performance art, body art and feminist art. She was also engaged in “conceptual poetry” or “visual poetry” and created “poetic objects”.

Born in 1945 in Grodzisk Mazowiecki, she graduated from the Łódź State Art School (PWSSP Łódź) and at the Department of Painting at Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw.