Sponsored by the UVA Arts Council: Enriching the Arts on Grounds

Monday, April 9 | 6pm | Location TBD | Learn More >

YUGOEXPORT: The import-export business of making history demands an equivalence, a loyalty, and a familial solidarity between people and things. Such skills are best honed in conditions of blindness, where we cannot immediately tell what is in the room with us and whether it is alive or dead, person or thing, male or female.

Blind and non-aligned, the oral corporation extends its incorporation indefinitely. Incorporated in the United States (where corporations are people), launched in Paris and headquartered in Belgrade, she is a copy or avatar of Jugoeksport, a defunct Yugoslav apparel manufacturer and weapons exporter.

Since the dissolution of Yugoslavia in 2003, ‘Yug’ is a vacant space, and the oral corporation occupies it by returning to the original meaning of yug or jug which is south. The oral corporation mounts production on a sur-national scale from this cardinal direction, from the Balkans and the old Roman trade and military route Via Militaris.

Welcome to a terrain of production from the mouth.

Irena Haiduk is an Assistant Professor at Northwestern University and the founder of Yugoexport. She has exhibited at the Institute for Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Museum of Arts and Design, New York; Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago; AKUD, Berlin; the 4th Athens Biennale; 14th Istanbul Biennial; the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago and, this past summer, at Documenta 14. A monograph of Haiduk’s written works and scores, Spells, has been published Sternberg Press in 2015. A book on Seductive Exacting Realism is forthcoming by the Renaissance Society and Sternberg Press.