Interrogating Exclusion: A Summary.

After the Second World War, Yugoslavia experienced significant political, social, economic, and cultural transformations as it shifted from the Kingdom of Yugoslavia to the People’s Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. This transition occurred at varying speeds across different parts of the country. In line with socialist revolution, Kosovo developed its own model of cultural production. The rise of abstract art in Yugoslavia marked a significant shift in official cultural policy, representing a departure from the Soviet Union’s socialist realism in 1948 and reflecting the federation’s efforts to align with the values of the so-called “free world.”1

When viewed through a gender lens, the Kosovo art history after the Second World War largely overlooks women artists. In the years following the war, women attended the Peja Art High School, founded in 1949, which trained students in applied arts for university programs across various Yugoslav centers. Later, two additional professional institutions were established: the High Vocational School of Arts in Prishtina in 1962, and the Academy of Fine Arts in 1972. However, compared to men, fewer women were encouraged to cultivate their individual artistic practices or pursue art as a profession; instead, many were directed toward careers in art education or related fields.

In order for women to study art in the Yugoslav space, they had to rethink their role within Kosovo society first. During the socialist era, women and men had equal access to education, but despite these opportunities being available to all, women faced significant cultural barriers to enjoy and access them. Public spaces remained male-dominated, making it challenging for women to establish themselves beyond the private sphere and domestic responsibilities. Nonetheless, access to art education enabled women to assert themselves as artists, and over time, they began exhibiting their work, gradually carving out a place in the local art scene. Though very few in number, these artistic positions held by women artists are significant and provide critical insights of the period at hand.

In the early 1960s, Alije Vokshi graduated from the department of Figurative Arts at the High Pedagogical School in Prishtina. Her expressionist portraits of women, men, elderly, and workers, with a particular focus on their hands, were well received. Encouraged by her professors, and later her father, she went to study in the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade. By gaining admission in 1968, she became the first woman to study art and take up painting as a profession in Kosovo. In 1978, Vokshi spent an academic year at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in the class of Yves Brayer, Paris, France. Three years later, in 1981, she received her master’s degree from the Academy of Figurative Arts in Belgrade2. In 1974, until her retirement in 2015, Vokshi taught painting at the Department of Graphic Design at the University of Prishtina. In tandem with her teaching, she developed her art practice and exhibited her work locally and in other centers of Yugoslavia.

In 2016, in the absence of a written history of modern art, as part of the Oral History Initiative I started a series of oral history interviews in collaboration with the National Gallery of Kosovo. The project aimed to produce a book capturing the life stories of modernist artists in their own words. However, diversifying the pool of interviewees proved challenging—out of the six interviews featured in the book, only one was with a woman, Alije Vokshi. Her career followed a trajectory similar to that of her male counterparts, yet despite the Gallery continuously acquiring new works for its collection, the only piece owned by Alije Vokshi was Portrait (of an Old Woman), 1972. The reproductions of this single portrait were repeatedly used to represent her entire artistic practice from 1979 till 2000, appearing in annual reviews, collection catalogs, and monographs. As a result, giving the public the impression that she hadn’t produced any other significant work beyond that piece. This reductive manner of granting her visibility was basically exclusion.

During Vokshi’s time, women who studied fine arts, went for professions in art education or similar, because that ensured a degree of financial independence. A significant obstacle to remaining in the art scene was also the lack of an art studio. Apart from Alije Vokshi, none of the other women artists had access to a studio. The lack of studios for women to create art, compared to their male counterparts, coupled with their limited visibility in the art scene, made it difficult for women to remain active as independent artists. The oral history project in 2016 raised further questions about the representation of women in art historical accounts and led me to other women artists. Initially, a trained painter, Violeta Xhaferi, by working as a costume designer for the People’s National Theatre in Prishtina, Kosovo, allowed her to support herself financially while remaining engaged in artistic production, even without a dedicated studio. She didn’t need much space to sketch her designs; she could easily work from home or office.

In her oral history interview, Violeta Xhaferi reflects on this profound divide between artistic life and family life:

“I was deeply immersed in my day-to-day life [and could not apply to present my work in exhibitions]—I had two children, and I faced the challenge, like many women, of balancing motherhood with building a career. These are two opposing worlds. Even the most renowned female artists admit to sacrificing their families to be able to create because the two simply don’t align. For me, it was incredibly difficult. I had to run errands, cook, take my children to kindergarten, and pick them up after work. It was an exhausting struggle to manage it all. […] Costume design doesn’t require much—just a corner of the dining table, a sheet of paper, and a pencil were enough for me to sketch designs for theater plays. Pursuing painting, on the other hand, would have demanded better working conditions—at least a kitchen where you wouldn’t be interrupted or, ideally, a room of your own at home.”3

The art of this period was predominantly abstract, incorporating diverse aesthetic expressions such as expressionism, art informel, and other poetic configurations. Through these overarching styles, a collective vision of modernity within Yugoslav art space was promoted. The rise of modern art brought with it new terminology and interpretative frameworks, positioning abstract art as a universal international visual language4—though this was not the case in Kosovo. Until 1979, Kosovo had no state-managed galleries or independent exhibition spaces necessary for an art scene to thrive. There was a lack of professional galleries, art institutions, critics, collectors, and even an informed audience. The founding of the Gallery of Art of Prishtina—the first institution of its kind—provided a platform to develop strategies to display art. Modeled structurally after Yugoslav art institutions, the Gallery became a hub that absorbed and showcased stylistic influences from across Yugoslavia’s art scenes and beyond.

As the main art institution of the visual arts and a gatekeeper of a tradition in Kosovo, the Gallery of Art’s management reflected very little on the absence of women within their exhibition and public programs. In their first decade, public programming was structured around Yugoslav artistic collaborations, international exhibitions, cultural exchanges, and solo exhibitions by local male artists, which contributed to their positioning as “Old Masters.” During these formative years of the institution, there was an attempt to create a cultural identity for Kosovo, however it was based on the experience of male artists solely. Structurally excluded, women did not play a great part in defining what was eventually known as the modern art in Kosovo.

Efforts to ensure women’s representation in Kosovo’s institutional art scene were undermined by gender biases. The Gallery of Arts of Prishtina held an annual group exhibition on International Women’s Day, March 8, which was locally viewed as Mother’s Day until recently. These exhibitions often featured female artists from various Yugoslav centers, which helped to silence the absence of local women in the arts. For example, one such exhibition was “Femrat Krijuese ‘82” (Female Creators ‘82)5. Most female artists exhibiting were not local, and yet, the exhibition was meant to showcase Kosovo women’s contribution in the arts. Lacking critical discourse to position their artworks, these shows ultimately contributed to the ghettoization of their artistic practices.

Opportunities for exhibiting in the broader Yugoslav art space primarily came through artists’ associations. Kosovo had three such associations: Shoqata e Artistëve Figurativë (The Visual Artists Association), founded in 1962 and led by Muslim Mulliqi; Shoqata e Artistëve Aplikativë të Kosovës (The Kosovo Applicative Artists Association), established in 1967 and led by Shyqri Nimani; and Shoqata e Artistëve Figurativë të Prishtinës (The Pristina Visual Artists Association), formed in 1972 and led by Kadrush Rama6. Artists associations were essential for gaining entry into the art world. However, a closer examination of the professional biographies of women artists reveals that they had significantly fewer exhibitions listed, indicating that they benefited far less from these associations.

The dissolution of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s deeply destabilized the art system and its institutions. Following the revocation of Kosovo’s autonomy in 1989, Kosovo Albanians were dismissed from public sector jobs and excluded from state institutions. This political shift significantly impacted the cultural sphere as well. The Gallery of Arts in Prishtina was not accessible to Kosovo Albanian artists, and art associations lost their networking infrastructure. The 1990s in Kosovo thus became a period defined by self-organized initiatives, fostering a cultural and political ecosystem that exemplified non-violent resistance to Milošević’s regime.

During this time, many restaurants and cafés run by Kosovo Albanians became alternative exhibition spaces. Hani i Dy Robertëve provided a refuge and a platform for the Albanian artistic community, hosting events such as the annual exhibition Salloni i Nëntorit (November Salon), which had previously been organized by the Gallery of Arts of Prishtina. Similarly, cafés like Koha and Fjala played vital roles in sustaining the vibrancy of cultural life. Despite the challenges of the era, this period was significant for women artists. With limited access to the Gallery of Arts in Prishtina, they were now able to organize independent exhibitions in these informal spaces, fostering greater visibility for their practices.

The Dodona Gallery emerged as a vital gathering place for artists across generations and various media. It became the new hub for the art community, which had previously gravitated towards the Gallery of Arts in Prishtina during the 1980s. Serving as a platform for both graduating students and established artists who were no longer able to exhibit at the Prishtina Gallery, the space was supported by the SOROS Foundation and managed by Alisa Maliqi, a young architect at the time. Despite its brief existence, Dodona Gallery hosted thirty exhibitions and numerous cultural events, sustaining artistic activity during a period marked by deep isolation and de-institutionalization, which persisted until the war in 1999.

The art practices that emerged in the first decade following the war in Kosovo, a United Nations protectorate at the time, were not separated from the question of national identity, belonging and gender; quite the contrary, art produced in those years played a role in the process of reconfiguring and reevaluating the newly created political reality in Kosovo. Marked by multiple transitions, from an oppressive regime to liberation; from war-exhausted socialism to liberal market democracy; from war to peace, this period brought to surface a new generation of women artists who used different media as means to articulate their subject positions in the country’s reordered political space.

For instance, the video works The Flag (2005) by Nurhan Qehaja and Japan (2006) by Fitore Isufi-Koja, both employ the body and flag iconography to negotiate body politics and national identity. Through a flexible and self-aware praxis, they not only reclaim corporeality but use the body as a site to counter cultural essentialisms and undo national and transnational imaginaries. Gendered and subject to alterations by an array of cultural and historical factors, the body becomes an archive of affects, performance and embodied politics. These works were exhibited in contexts within and beyond Kosovo, fostering important feminist dialogues around their practice.

Today, Kosovo’s art scene is young, vibrant, and significantly more accommodating and inclusive of women than in the past. Numerous artists employ feminist tactics and discuss politics against the backdrop of gender disparity. By critically examining conditions of exclusion, they have contributed in generating new knowledge about women’s subject positions, thereby opening up new possibilities for women to inhabit in the arts.

*This text was revised and updated on December 2, 2024.

1
Kolešnik, Ljiljana. “Conflicting Visions of Modernity and the Post-war Modern Art.” Modernism and Socialism: Art, Culture, Politics 1950-1974, edited by Ljiljana Kolešnik, MSU, Zagreb, 2012, pp. 107-179..

2Secondary Archive, a platform
for women artists from Central and Eastern Europe. The Kosovo edition of the archive was curated by Renea Begolli and Erëmirë Krasniqi in 2022. Link:https://secondaryarchive.org/artists/alije-vokshi/; page visited last: September 10, 2024..

3Interview with Violeta Xhaferi, conducted by Erëmirë Krasniqi for the Oral History Initiative on January 30 and February 8, 2017. The interview is part of the shadow archive..

4Kolešnik, Ljiljana. “Conflicting Visions of Modernity and the Post-war Modern Art.” Modernism and
Socialism: Art, Culture, Politics 1950-1974, edited by Ljiljana Kolešnik, MSU, Zagreb, 2012, pp. 107-179..

5Exhibition catalog Femrat Krijuese ‘82 obtained from the archive of the National Gallery of Kosovo.
Organized in 1982, the exhibition had two editions altogether..

6Information obtained from the archive of the National Gallery of Kosovo, a section containing annual
reviews, catalogs, and other ephemera published prior 1989..