This paper concerns itself with the study of art and its visual code through
the hegemonic ideology of capitalism in Slovenia in the context of the
former Yugoslavia, one of the founding members of the Non-Aligned
Movement. It seeks to answer the question of how the visual code of nonalignment interacted with the hegemonic code of capitalism and how art
changed under the influence of the post-WW2 conditions in which it was
produced, in the period of a bipolar world which, in the 1960s, saw the
emergence of the so-called third way of non-alignment.
At a time of decolonial political shifts, with political emancipation and the
emergence of numerous new political entities, the colonial past could not
be completely escaped; it shifted instead to different levels, ushering in
novel forms of colonialism. Our thesis is that in this period, colonialism
was transferred to the cultural and visual spheres. Using as examples the
Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts and the gallery exhibition politics in
Ljubljana, we attempt to understand the scope of cultural imperialism in
the context of the non-aligned socialist Yugoslavia. Studying the forms
of modernism at the time in the area in question reveals what it entailed
and how modernist trends in art served as the vehicle for the fundamental
transmission of capitalist values.
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