Southern Constellations: Poetics of the Non-Aligned (It is not enough to write a revolutionary poem)

Filodrammatica Gallery, Croatia, 24 September to 15 October 2021

As part of the 16th edition of Mine, Yours, Ours program, on the 60th anniversary of the founding conference of the Non-Aligned Movement, we present the exhibition Southern Constellations: Poetics of the Non-Aligned (It is not enough to write a revolutionary poem), curated by Bojana Piškur and organized in collaboration with Moderna galerija, Ljubljana.

Presented at Filodrammatica Gallery (Korzo 28/1, Rijeka) from 24 September to 15 October 2021, the exhibition includes works by artists Dan Acostioaei, Nika Autor, Đorđe Balmazović, Ferenc Gróf, Ibro Hasanović, Dubravka Sekulić, Hyun-Suk Seo and Mila Turajlić, a cartography of SFR Yugoslavia’s international collaborations in culture with developing countries (by Teja Merhar), and selected archival materials of the Non-Aligned Movement.


“It is not enough to write a revolutionary poem is an adapted version of the Southern Constellations: Poetics of the Non-Aligned exhibition that was first shown in the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, Ljubljana in 2019. The second edition was presented in the Asia Culture Center in Gwangju, South Korea in 2020. The exhibition in Rijeka is conceptualized in a different way, as it coincides with the 60th anniversary of the first NAM conference in Belgrade. It focuses on historical cases as a kind of introduction to the cultural politics of the Non-Aligned Movement; the projects and researches presented are related to the cultural programs and cultural exchanges between Yugoslavia and the non-aligned countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

The exhibition also includes contemporary works that examine the relevance or use of NAM’s ideas for the present from the position that “it is not enough to write a revolutionary poem.” The reasons for this are multiple: disillusions with the current global world order, especially regarding the rapid neo-liberal globalization which has created huge problems – inequality, the rise of new forms of economic and political dependency, the rise of right-wing politics and fascisms, and so on. The exhibition in Rijeka therefore proposes rethinking the following: Can the non-aligned internationalism, which had significant power at some point, be revived again? How can these ideas be used in a practical and political sense? And what to do with NAM’s cultural heritage, with the archives, the works of art, the collections? To truly reconsider this legacy in the sphere of culture today, more radical measures would need to be considered, not only on a declaratory, but on the applicative levels: on the levels of governance, knowledge production, and heritage. This is becoming increasingly difficult because of the existing and the newly emerging historical revisionist right-wing politics in our region and further afield, which are systematically destroying not only the ideas of anti-fascism, socialism, and non-alignment, but also violating our rights and our freedom of expression.

It is not enough to write a revolutionary poem, one must become this poem.”

Bojana Piškur
curator