Luxurious clothes, valuable jewelry, and insignia says much about how female rulers were seen at the Byzantine court and how they were represented; usually by khtetors’ compositions with the ruler, sometimes with children, or through other visual representations. Their power and the intensity of that power can be visually perused from the luxurious way female rulers dressed, by wearing insignia, i.e. adorning themselves with expensive jewelry, and generally from their visual representation; whereby some also bring out the importance of their motherhood aspect. Noble silks and luxurious textiles played a very important role in the secular and sacred life of Byzantine society, as they were used in ceremonies, diplomacy and state propaganda. In fact, the female rulers in the Byzantine Empire and the countries of the Byzantine cultural circle were often dressed similarly to the male rulers. Rulers and high-ranking church officials achieved their plans and goals in the field of politics, diplomacy and military through visual representation and gifts of luxury textiles. Throughout the Middle Ages and the early modern era, luxurious silk fabrics played a particularly important role in communicating “wealth and the authority of power,” defining the function of “the body and space as an arena for displaying several types of power, such as social, religious and political, with female rulers and female khtetors playing a notable role in the Balkans and the Mediterranean area.”

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Архитектура као медиј репрезентације одувек је била један од најекспресивнијих начина за приказивање моћи наручиоца. Наручилац није особа која пасивно прихвата идеју архитекте, него активно учествује у реализацији грађевине коју финансира. Циљ овог рада је истражити наруџбине грофа Крсте II Оршића Славетићког (1718–1782) у вези с резиденцијалном архитектуром, односно резиденцијална архитектура ће се проучавати као медиј личне и породичне репрезентације. У раду се неће обрађивати свака Оршићева наруџбина и куповина стамбених објеката нити ће се оне хронолошки пописати. Уместо тога, сваки од одабраних објеката, од којих се неки налазе на селу, а други у урбаним срединама, анализираће се као засебна студија случаја. Покушаћемо да идентификујемо аналогије у просторном и декоративном обликовању тих објеката те да проучимо Оршићеву улогу у коначној реализацији грађевина које је наручивао. Аналогије, резултат жеља наручиоца, откривају се у просторној организацији архитектонских склопова, тлоцртној диспозицији ентеријера те у репертоару украсних мотива на остварењима примењене уметности. Занимљиво је истакнути да је Оршићев син Адам (1748–1820) у својим мемоарима описао изградњу и значај неколико грађевина обрађених у овом раду.

The subject of this research is the examination of the origin and development of the normal and italic form of the lowercase letter “б” (equivalent to the English letter “b”) in the Serbian typography of the newer era, whereupon the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets share their stylistic characteristics united in the same type system. It will, therefore, help us answer the question related to the desirable form of the letter “б” in the Serbian language. The aim of this paper is to resolve the dilemma of whether the alternative form of the letter “б” with a diagonal stroke starting on the right, which appears today only in the Serbian language, is also mandatory, i.e. whether the form located in the primary place is suitable for the Serbian language. By reviewing and analyzing printed sources of the Serbian language from the 18^th, 19^th and 20^th centuries (books, periodicals and type catalogs), type forms present in fonts used by hand, as well as machine and photo typesetting were examined. A comparison was made with handwritten and drawn letterforms, which are the basis for type forms. Finally, digital fonts with Cyrillic letters by foreign and domestic authors were reviewed. Based on examples from the past and contemporary practice, it was concluded that both variants of the letter “б” are equally acceptable in Serbian Cyrillic, and that the choice and method of application is determined by the author of the typeface, who decides whether to choose a particular variant through the localization function or rather, to offer both variants as stylistic alternates. Regarding the decisions on letter shape and stroke thickness, the recommended solutions should be sought in the examples of typefaces by domestic authors, where the parameters are the typeface style, proportions and size range, while the criteria are the recognition of individual letters and stylistic consistency.

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The subject of this paper is the relation between costume design and fashion at the end of the 19^th and beginning of the 20^th century on the example of costumes worn by Vela Nigrinova (1862 – 1908), the famous and leading actress of the National Theatre in Belgrade. Research of costume design in our country is rare and concentrated mostly in the field of theatre arts and precludes the specific and often two-way relation between fashion and costume design, which in some historical periods is important for understanding certain processes in creating theatre costumes. In the 19^th century, the appearance of the first fashion designers and fashion houses was reflected in costume design in the form of a specific connection between haute couture and the theatres in Europe. The theatre costumes worn by Vela Nigrinova seen in this context indicate that the approach to costume design at the National Theatre in Belgrade was the same as elsewhere in the world. As an artist, Nigrinova had the power to become an example of elegance and style on stage, such as Madeleine Guimard, Marie Taglioni or Sarah Bernhardt, and perhaps inspire and impact the taste and clothing of the ladies in the audience who at that time had abandoned the last Oriental elements in clothing and replaced them with appealing European fashion.

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The building of the Home for War Invalids (1933–1935) represents one of the most important achievements of prominent architect and university professor of the Technical Faculty, University of Belgrade, Dimitrije M. Leko. The need to build a home for war invalids was especially relevant in the mid 1920s, and its materialisation was realised through an edifice erected in 1935 which testifies to numerous financial inconveniences that the state had encountered after World War I, but it is also a testament to the strong marginalisation of this social group carried out by the state and Yugoslav society. The first significant initiative was to build a facility that would represent a solution for accommodating the large number of impoverished war invalids, which appeared in 1928 when a competition was announced for the creation of a conceptual plan for the Home for War Invalids. This initiative was proposed by the Association of War Invalids, one of the most important organizations for the disabled in the interwar period. The building was supposed to be located on Mali Kalemegdan, on land ceded by the Municipality of the City of Belgrade. Due to an unfavourable financial situation in the state, the construction of the facility was postponed until 1933, when the location of the building was changed. The facility was to be built on one of the most important squares in Belgrade, Wilson Square (today’s “Savski Trg”). After the competition was announced in 1933, the conceptual plan of respected architect Dimitrije M. Leko was selected. Architect Leko conceived the functional floor plan of the building which united a wide range of different units: a boarding house for children with disabilities, a guesthouse for invalids, business premises of the Association of War Invalids with a printing house, premises for representative purposes, a large number of flats, offices, shops and warehouses. The facade of this four-storey building reflected the aesthetics of modernised academicism, as well as the forthcoming monumentalism. Well-proportioned, made of purified facade surfaces and without a pronounced visual dominance, this building radiates with a certain sense of the sublime, representing the personal artistic expression of the architect. As one of the significant representative works of architecture of modernised academicism of the 1930s in Serbia, this monumental palace has enriched the capital’s architecture in many ways with its harmonious and authentic composition.

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As Japonisme in Serbian fashion of the first half of the 20^th century was the result of Western fashion influences, its inception in the national fashion system can be traced in Milena Pavlović Barilli’s 1920s works as pioneering representations of westernized Japanese modern girls – Modan garu. With the restoration of bilateral relations between Serbia and Japan after the Second World War, Kenzo Takada’s global impact in the 1970s is revealed in Anđelka Slijepčević’s writings. At the same time, Aleksandar Joksimović resorted to ‘self-orientalization’ by turning Romanian folk costumes in kimono-resembling forms as a response to Dior and Saint Laurent’s appropriations of Japan, whereas in the 1980s Ljiljana Žegarac designed actual kimonos. After Tokyo’s positioning as a global fashion capital in the 1980s and the foundation of Belgrade Fashion Week in 1996, the influence of Japanese avant-garde designers Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto, and Rei Kawakubo can be identified at the end of the 20 ^th and the beginning of the 21 ^st century Serbian fashion. By analyzing the collections of contemporary Serbian fashion designers, it is noticeable how the Japanese avant-garde has encoded itself in their expression as a denouncement of tradition. The Japonisme discourse in Serbian fashion is thus completed through an insight into the most recent fashion practices. While not a dominant aesthetic and stylistic tendency in Serbian fashion, Japonisme marked it to an extent, allowing both its contextualization within Serbian fashion history and the strengthening of Serbian fashion within global fashion, welcoming further studies on the subject.

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This paper tries to problematize the issue of the musealization of sacral heritage starting from the assumption that an undefined and insufficiently applied theory on one hand, and an insufficiently known practice within the monastery on the other, represent two dependent albeit often completely different fields. Their further affirmation and coherent use in science would contribute to a clear and unambiguous positioning of such topics within the studies of museology, especially in the realms of the Orthodox Christian tradition. This paper shows an example how in situ musealization has its own laws which often change the optics of museology in a general sense and create new forms of a modern thesaurus.

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Climate change as a long-term challenge imposes an obligation for individuals and institutions to face the consequences of these changes. Thus, the role of a social agent that the theater realizes relates not only to pointing out the current paradigms of the climate crisis through stage narratives, but also its overall business strategies and the organizational culture it nurtures. The theater has to redesign its production approaches and ways of doing business – as elements and factors of art institutions’ “green politics.” In this regard, the various aspects and possibilities of the transformation of the process of planning and shaping costumes in modern theater systems are identified – from the implementation of energy efficiency measures, to the adoption of the concept of material reuse and recycling. However, certain segments of globally advocated recommendations in this context (such as the reuse of existing costumes or second-hand procurement sources) are already part of everyday practice in the Serbian theaters, but the question arises whether those practices are grounded on “green motives.” With the aim of answering this question, and having in mind the relevant practical recommendations of the adaptation protocol, we examine how much (and whether) globally pleaded activities of green transformation are present in the costume sector of Belgrade’s city theaters.

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Judy Chicago is a famous feminist artist from the United States of America. Chicago has frequently used artistic media that have historically been categorized as that of a lesser value compared to the works belonging to the category called fine arts. Two feminist authors, Griselda Pollock and Rozsika Parker, exposed the existing hierarchy of arts in art history in their seminal book Old Mistresses: Women, Art, and Ideology. The two authors wrote about the ways in which embroidery, quilts, and needlework have often been regarded as works belonging to the domain of crafts or applied arts because of their connections to the spheres of the home and their authors, who were in most cases, women. Feminist artists have used textile in their pieces in different subversive ways in order to show their political message, while using artistic disciplines that have often been left unacknowledged in art history. This paper looks at the ways in which Chicago used needlework in her works The Dinner Party and International Honor Quilt. It also looks at a piece called The Feminine Divine which was commissioned by Dior and based on Chicago’s previous pieces and feminist activism.

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The uniqueness of the art collection Gori of the villa Celle, which is the subject of this work, is important for an insight into the artistic thinking of the late XX century and the study of site-specific art. The works of art in this collection encourage the viewer to specify the focus and examine the process which each artist had created respecting the ethics of the work in nature. The specificity of the garden of the villa, Gambini’s Garden, articulated all the art of the collection, turning it into an interactive situation. In various artistic responses to the spatial framework of Gambini’s Garden, three basic approaches stand out: spatial rationalization, examination of natural-artificial relations and, an open critique of the artificiality of the idea of an ideal, romantic, landscape in the modern world we live in. As part of a rational approach, Robert Morris and Dani Karavan adapt their artistic concept completely to the spatial framework. On the other hand, Richard Serra and Daniel Buren deal with the relationship between the perception of the observer and the artistic object of architectural form and proportion. Although the place of realization of the object for these artists is in the role of the spatial rule and the unchangeable parameter in the process of artistic work, it is still in the background in relation to the artist’s intention. Finally, George Trakas reveals the artificiality of Gambini’s idealized landscape, which is separate from all the tensions of both the industrial world and the modern moment. A critical reading of the artistic heritage of the Gori villa refers at the same time to the art object, then to the landscape within which the art object is placed as a lens of observation, and the impression of the space that the observer goes through via the interaction with the art object. Thus, the artistic practice characteristic of the location is related to the intrusion into the real space and as such, the real space with its geographical, historical, cultural and other characteristics is the basis for the experience of the work of art.

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The decolonial turn in social sciences induced in the first decade of this century by a group of Latin American sociologists, semiologists, anthropologists and literary critics and historized under the name Modernity / Coloniality had a significant influence on the interpretation of the ways in which non-Western artists were becoming included into curated exhibitions of contemporary art. Some exhibitions, such as The Third Havana Biennial and Les magiciens de la Terre, both from 1989, were reinterpreted on those grounds, and through monographic publicans inaugurated as groundbreaking for the understanding of today’s curatorial practices. On the other hand, artistic practices increasingly include decolonial approaches, and both Golden Lions at this year’s Venice Biennale (for the best national pavilion and the best artist in the central exhibition) were awarded for works of such kind, i. e. for celebrating black female voices in the work of Sonia Boyce, and for the creolization of form in the work of Simone Leigh. Nevertheless, the historization of the decolonial turn in art is still being generated from fragments, and the first topological attempt, quite in line with the methodology of nonsystematic trends in decolonial writing, was conducted by art historian and curator Ivan Muñiz-Reed. Starting from the premises that he came forward with and from the curated exhibitions he has stressed as paradigmatic for the decolonial turn, this text maps the outlines of the archipelago of decolonial exhibitions, as well as its expansion.

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In this paper, we will try to define the influence of avant - garde film and photography in relation to the production of architecture and the features of architectural avant - garde practice from the beginning of the XX century. Achievements within avant-garde film in the history of film art have produced some of the most authentic and successful works of art that can be found in that period of film development. From this statement we can conclude the importance of understanding the concept and art of avant-garde film and photography and their impact on other artistic practices. There was a tendency to create a universal language through film and photography based on the fundamental aesthetic principles of the modern age, just as all modernist movements in architecture shared the aspiration to create a universal, cosmopolitan and progressive aesthetic language. Aesthetic ideas that fragment and analyze the form, made it possible to examine the way in which the content was expressed in the architecture of the modern movement. The created conditions enabled the development of new program ideas, the definition of views, the transmission of light into the object, the relationship between light and shadow, formed a new field of work. Exploring new geometric possibilities, in order to create an architecture that strives for the ideal of existential space, was an inspiring means of work. Certainly, photography and experimental film have made a significant impact in the context of avant-garde ideas in architecture. Perceiving space in this way represents a change in the experience of architecture, a change in the experience brought by modernism. Moving images change perceptions and experiences and place architecture in a reflection of a fragmented modern way of life.

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