Art on the Margins in Theory and Practice: Marina Gržinić, Necrorealism, and the Retro-Avant-Garde

The article compares the Ljubljana alternative scene of the 1980s and the Leningrad Necrorealism as two locally specific responses to the crisis of late socialism. It focuses on the work of Marina Gržinić, whose concepts enable a joint reading of both. The starting thesis is that the media economy of scarcity and low-tech production conditions (8/16mm, VHS) shaped aesthetics that re-established the relationships between the body, power, and death. Yevgeny Yufita’s Necrorealism is interpreted as a “politics of the indistinguishable” that deconstructs ideological representations, while Gržinić and Šmid’s video practice functions as a critical framework for their reinterpretation. The article shows that the transition from avant-garde utopia to (necro)dystopian regimes of visibility coincides with the collapse of ideological and representational frameworks and can be considered through the concept of necrodystopia.

The integral version of this article can be found in the printed KINO!