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Lina Dzuverovic

Positions held:
  • Lecturer, School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication
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  • Overview

    Overview

    Biography

    Dr Lina Džuverović is Lecturer in Arts Policy and Management at the Department for Film, Media and Cultural Studies, an independent curator and founding director of Electra, a London-based contemporary arts organisation. Her research focuses on feminist art histories and contemporary art as a site of solidarity and community-building. Lina founded the Decolonial Feminist Forum at Birkbeck in 2019.  


    Previously Lina was Artistic Director of Calvert 22 Foundation, Media Arts Curator at ICA, London, Education Curator at Lux Centre and has taught fine art at University of Reading and Institute for Contemporary Art, TU Graz, Austria.

    Selected exhibitions include: “Monuments Should Not Be Trusted” (Nottingham Contemporary, 2016), “Sanja Iveković – Unknown Heroine” (South London Gallery and Calvert 22 Foundation, 2012), “27 Senses” (Chisenhale Gallery, London; Kunstmuseet KUBE, Norway, 2009/10), “Favoured Nations” (5th Nordic Biennial of Contemporary Art, 2009), “Her Noise” (South London Gallery, 2005). 


    Prior to completing her PhD at the Critical Writing in Art & Design Department, Royal College of Art and Tate (CDA AHRC), Lina studied at The London Consortium (Birkbeck College),  Central Saint Martin's College of Art and Design and Chelsea College of Art and Design. 

    Web profiles

    ORCID

    0000-0002-5240-0589
  • Research

    Research

    Research interests

    • Governance and management of small-scale visual arts organisations
    • Art collectives, labour and gender
    • Intersectional feminist and decolonial politics in arts policy and management
    • Feminist self-organisation
    • Politics and mechanics of collaborative work
    • Conceptual art, interdisciplinary practices and institutional critique
    • Curatorial practice and labour conditions in the contemporary art sector
    • Yugoslav art, Student Cultural Centres and interdisciplinarity 1960s – 1990s
    • Self-management and cultural politics in socialist Yugoslavia
    • The Antifascist Women’s Front in Yugoslavia and its legacies Artistic autonomy, national representation and soft power
    • Critical art geography and issues of neocolonialism

    Research overview

    My research focuses on the field of contemporary art as a site of solidarity and community-building. Through the project And Others: The Gendered Politics and Practices of Art Collectives, I am currently researching the internal workings and division of labour within artists’ collectives, seeking to highlight inequalities, forms of silencing and marginalising of certain participants. 

    More broadly, my research interests include articulations of feminist goals in small visual arts organisations, based on my experience of founding and running Electra; intersections of cultural diplomacy and contemporary art through the study of soft-power; the confluence of sound-based practices and contemporary arts networks. 

    In 2019 I founded the Decolonial Feminist Forum at Birkbeck which meets regularly at the School of Arts or online. 

    As a practice-based researcher and curator my methods usually involve interviews, conversations, workshops, residencies, exhibitions and reading groups, all of which gradually shape the outcomes of my projects. Previous projects which have taken such an approach have included Her Noise, 27 Senses, Archive as Strategy as well as Monuments Should Not Be Trusted emerging from my PhD research. 

     

     

    Research Centres and Institutes

    • Co-director, Birkbeck Interdisciplinary Research in Media and Culture (BIRMaC)

    Research projects

    And Others: The Gendered Politics and Practices of Art Collectives

    Abstract
    • And Others: The Gendered Politics and Practices of Art Collectives examines the inner workings and division of labour within contemporary artists’ collectives, seeking to highlight inequalities, forms of silencing and marginalising of certain participants. Approaching the study of art collectives intersectionally, it critically examines their constitutions, processes and practices, drawing on social reproduction theory, the notion of ‘the disoeuvre’ (Allen, 2016), proposing a wider reading of what constitutes artistic practice and advocating for a more inclusive approach to collectivity. The project highlights tensions between ideological beliefs and praxis, examining how such groups may inadvertently reproduce forms of oppression and silencing (often along gender lines) prevalent in neoliberal capitalist patriarchies that they seek to counter. Such reproduction of oppressive structures not only erases certain subjects, but also writes them into history in particular ways. Shifting the focus from outputs to collectives’ internal operations, the project highlights structural inequalities and tensions, through a close study of selected groups operating within the networks of contemporary art.
    Outcomes
    • Four Panel Discussions, October - December 2022: 
      • Panel One: Labour, Value and Social Reproduction, Monday 31 October, 7pm GMT
      • Panel Two: Why collaborate? Network Formation, Reproduction, Access
        Thursday 10 November, 5pm GMT
      • Panel Three: Is Ephemerality Freedom?
        Friday 18 November, 6pm GMT
      • Panel Four: ‘The Third Hand’—Claire, Bernadette and Friends
        Thursday 1 December, 7pm GMT
    • Collaborative Actions, Continued Omissions: Notes Towards a Feminist Revisiting of Yugoslav Collectives in the 1960s and 1970s – the Case of the OHO Group
      Essay published in ‘Fragments for Studies on Art Organisations‘, Kuda.org, 2020, Novi Sad (Serbian and English); in ‘What Will Be Already Exists – Temporalities of Cold War Archives in East-Central Europe and Beyond’, transcript Verlag, 2021 (English) and Enigma Journal, Budapest, 2021 (Hungarian).
  • Supervision and teaching

    Supervision and teaching

    Supervision

    Supervisions external to Birkbeck:
    1
    Supervisions within Birkbeck:
    2

    I welcome enquiries from prospective PhD students who are interested in undertaking research in any of my areas of research interest.

    Current doctoral researchers

    • HAOTONG WANG
      Nature of supervision:
      Joint Principal Supervisor, onwards

    Doctoral alumni since 2013-14

    • CLARE HAVELL
      Nature of supervision:
      Joint Principal Supervisor,
      Title of thesis:
      Anonymity and the stigmatised subject: The face and voice of the sex worker in documentary film practice
      Awarded:
      2024
  • Publications

    Publications

    Article

    Book

    • Dzuverovic, Lina and Crowley, D. and Dimitrijevic, B. and Kirn, G. and Pejic, B. and Piskur, B. Dzuverovic, Lina, ed. (2016) Monuments should not be trusted. Nottingham, UK: Nottingham Contemporary. ISBN 9781907421082.

    Book Section

    Conference Item

    Exhibition