The concepts and the representative practices of the 'Socialist Modernism' as the main principle of culture of the Yugoslav Socialist state is one of the important chapters of the project Political Practices of [post-] Yugoslav Art. I already tackled some problems in historical and new understanding of the term through the texts Brave New World of Modernism and In the Search for Socialist City, dedicated to the concept of New Belgrade and project "Differentiated Neighborhood" which traces the changes and deviations of this concept in the recent transitional times.

Curatorial collective WHW from Zagreb have organized the documentary exhibition under the title "Bakić and New Tendencies" which, with the potent political decisiveness, presents the ideological constellation in which this socialist-modernist public sphere have been destroyed together with its inherent social values.

"Bakić and New Tendencies" is a documentary-archival show that includes various educational and debate-oriented programs related to the notion of Socialist Modernism and Yugoslav public monuments. The exhibition includes approximately fifty sculptures of the smaller and middle formats, series of maquettes, models for the monuments, studies and drawings [some of them being publicly presented for the first time]. It is also conducted through the guided tour and the interviews or testimonies of the numerous cultural workers, whose practice has to do with the problematic of socialist modernism and Vojin Bakić's art from various historical contexts and perspectives.

"Bakić and New Tendencies" poses the questions about the reasons for forgetting Vojin Bakić as one of the most outstanding figures of modernism in contemporary Croatia and Socialist Yugoslavia, and why, for the wider public, his work exists today 'only as the disconnected sequence of fragments’.

While during the sixties Vojin Bakić achieves the climax of critical and arthistorical valorisation, during the last decades his work is exposed to material devastation and intellectual marginalization. In the swing of nationalism and anti-communism at the beginning of 90s, Vojin Bakić's capital works - monuments to the People Liberation Struggle and victims of fascism - are ruined and left to oblivion. His famous Memorial to Partisan Hospital at Petrova Gora [recently thematized in David Maljković's video trilogy "Scene for New Heritage", 2004-2005] in the meantime acquired the new function in the sphere of vulgar pragmatism: as a high enough postament for signal-transmitters of the Croatian State Television and T-Mobile Corporation.

All this recent changes are representing 'the works' of reactionary institutional critique which contributed to the destruction of the modernist-universalist public sphere and related political and cultural practices. What is destroyed here is obviously the publicly funded cultural sphere, which at least in theory adhered to modernist or, more broadly, the enlightenment values like education, equality and empowerment of disadvantaged groups. This institutional sphere is obviously attacked from the two sides today – one of neo-liberalism, which steered its transformation to become free market enterprises, and the other of nationalist indigenisms, aiming at the restriction of artistic freedom, the implementation of religious values, and the construction of new/old national cultures.

The new testimonies on Vojin Bakić and socialist-modernist heritage he was part of are trying to change the course of the contemporary representations of the socialist past in the global theoretical and artistic discourse. They question the dominant narratives of 'totalitarianism' and 'normalization', typical for post-socialist historical revisions, but also challenges the trendy nostalgic interests for the XX century modernism and its social project, iconic moments of socialism and in general all this utopian and optimistic, ambitious and dangerous, naïve past times that would never happen again.