Bogdan Bogdanović, born in Belgrade in 1922, is not only the leading architect of memorials in the former multi-ethnic state of Yugoslavia, but also an unconventional urbanologist, essayist and writer who „built to be able to write, and wrote so that he could build“.

The leitmotif of his surrealist youth flowed primarily into the alternative Village School for the Philosophy of Architecture (Dorfschule für Philosophie der Architektur) — a unique teaching experiment in the spirit of the 1968 movement. He was forced to leave his birthplace Belgrade with his wife Ksenija, an English specialist, due to a conflict with the Milošević regime. Today he lives and works in Vienna.

Between 1951 and 1987 Bogdanović completed over twenty memorials all over Yugoslavia to the victims of fascism and to commemorate people who resisted fascism. Free from ideological emblems and clearly detached from the taste guidelines of the socialist state, these archaic looking architectural ensembles invite visitors to stay and contemplate. How they are to be read and their symbolic significance are not prescribed but left up to the individual, who helps to define a shared anthropological memory. Bogdanović's poetic and pathos free treatment of sites of destruction are manifested, above all, in the Jasenovac flowers, which stand on the site of what was once a concentration camp.

Over 12,500 of the architect's works are to be found at the Az W, including both architectural designs as well as surrealist fantasies. Now it is possible to show and follow the working methods and thinking of this „architecture esoteric“ for the first time in one comprehensive exhibition.

Curator: Ivan Ristić

A catalogue of the same title, Bogdan Bogdanović. Commemoration and Utopias in Tito's Yugoslavia, is being published to accompany the exhibition.