In late July, I flew from Belgrade to New York. Leaving my Serbian homeland?s summer colours, I found myself immersed in the monochrome simulacra of Yugoslavia. At the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the ongoing exhibition Towards a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948-1980 conjures a vision of Balkan utopianism where the aura of concrete takes on almost mythic qualities.
?Monument to the Battle of the Sutjeska,? by Miodrag ?ivkovi?, 1965-71, Tjentiste, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Photo by Valentin Jeck.
Curated by Martino Stierli and Vladimir Kuli? with assistant Anna Kats, the exhibition charts three decades of architectural expression in the erstwhile Socialist Federalist Republic of Yugoslavia. The multi-ethnic state helped launch the non-aligned movement after a schism with the Soviet Union in 1948. During the federation?s short life?it dissolved in 1992 in the throes of war?rapid urbanization and cultural evolution built up an impressive legacy of late-modernist architecture. Decades later, many of those war monuments, cultural centres, government edifices and apartment blocks remain. At MoMA, they  are brought before Western eyes through scale models, drawings, films and, above all, photographs. Beckoning the eye in every room, Valentin Jeck?s dramatic, saturated photographs (commissioned by the museum) depict buildings and monuments that reach out from the landscape like relics of some alien civilization. Atop a blanket of snow, Miodrag Zivkovi??s kineticall...