Choreographies of Power and Counter-Power: The Socialist Body in Yugoslavia | Screening of “Slet 1998” + talk with filmmaker Marta Popivoda | 6 February 2026 | 15:00-17:00 | Leiden
Following the screening of Marta Popivoda’s films, on Thursday 5th February evening at the Netherlands Film Academy (Amsterdam), we invite you to join us the next day, Friday 6th February for the screening of Slet 1988, followed by a conversation with filmmaker Marta Popivoda
This afternoon in Leiden will be 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.
Screening
SLET 1988
2025, 22 min, Germany / France / Serbia
Synopsis. In Slet 1988, dancer Sonja Vukićević (74) moves through socialist-modernist spaces; her body is an archive of the last mass performance in Yugoslavia. Her gestures echo past rhythms and present realities, intertwining with a 1988 teenage girl’s diary to reveal the shift from socialist collectivism to rising individualism while a new national collective body is creeping in and will soon shape the future of the country.
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.
Discussants
Cristiana Strava is an assitant professor in the Leiden Institute for Area Studies (LIAS), a social anthropologist, trained at Harvard (BA) and SOAS, University of London (MARes, PhD), with a broad interest in urban spaces and the forces that shape our lives in and around them. She has conducted fieldwork in North, Western and East Africa on topics ranging from informal housing, gendered forms of waged and unwaged labor, marginalisation, and the politics of planning and development regimes. She is a co-director of ReCNTR.
Inaya Basu is a research masters student at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society, and the acting co-Director of ReCNTR.
Time & Place
Herta Mohr Building
Room 0.04
Witte Singel 27a
2311 BX Leiden
15:15-17:00
