Choreographies of Power and Counter-Power: The Socialist Body in Yugoslavia, a conversation with filmmaker Marta Popivoda | 6 February 2026 | 15:00-17:00 | Leiden

Following the screening of Marta Popivoda’s films, Yugoslavia: How Ideology Moved Our Collective Body and Slet 1998 on Thursday 5th February evening at the Netherlands Film Academy (Amsterdam), we invite you to join us the next day, Friday 6th February for an afternoon of conversation and collective thinking.

This talk and conversation is dedicated to sharing and discussing Marta Popivoda’s earlier and more recent research, with a particular emphasis on her long-term engagement with the political life of bodies in socialist Yugoslavia and its aftermath. The talk will focus on “Choreographies of Power and Counter-Power: The Socialist Body in Yugoslavia,” taking the films as a starting point to reflect on how ideology was staged in public space through mass performances, youth work actions, and state celebrations, as well as how these forms were later mirrored and challenged in protests and counter-mobilisations.

Speaker

Marta Popivoda is a filmmaker, artist, and researcher. The main concerns in her work are the tensions between memory, history, and ideology, as well as the relations between collective and individual bodies. Popivoda approaches them from a feminist and queer perspective. In her recent work, she uses landscape dramaturgy, feminist storytelling, and principles of radical slowness to produce scenes of antifascist and eco-feminist memory. Her work has been presented worldwide in the cinema and visual arts contexts, such as Berlinale, Locarno, IFFR, IDFA, New York Film Festival, Cairo International Film Festival, Visions du Réel, MoMA New York, Tate Modern London, MAXXI Rome, Manifesta Biennial, Berlin Biennale, to name just a few, and featured in the Guardian, Sight & Sound, Screen, Artforum, e-flux, etc. She received several awards for her films and artwork, including the prestigious Berlin Art Prize for the Visual Arts at the Akademie der Künste Berlin. She teaches film at the University of the Arts in Amsterdam and is a member of the European Film Academy. She was a fellow of the Berlin Artistic Research Programme 2024-25.

Time & Place

Herta Mohr Building
Room 0.04
Witte Singel 27a
2311 BX Leiden

15:15-17:00