Svetlana Kana Radević (1937-2000) is among the most prominent architects in socialist Yugoslavia and is the subject of an exhibition showcase some of her best works, among them being the anti-fascist memorials, hotels, residential projects, and civic buildings. Photographs, original drawings, correspondences and other documents stem from her private archive, so far unseen by the public and put at disposal to the exhibition team by Kana’s family.
The archival materials reflect her stylistic tendency and her character clearly – merging local materials and international Brutalist tendencies, always with one foot in her hometown of Titograd (today’s Podgorica), where she ran her namesake atelier, while at the same time holding tight to her international network in, among other places, Philadelphia and Tokyo.
Her private archive shows that in the geopolitical circumstances of her professional life, Svetlana Kana Radević was an architectural figure across societal registers: regionally, negotiating between vernacular building tradition and the globalizing tendencies of late modernism; nationally, designing celebrated civic spaces and social condensers that facilitated a progressive public sphere between the socialist state and its citizenry; and internationally, articulating a decentered, post-colonial axis by which the Montenegrin architect simultaneously and seamlessly worked between Philadelphia, Tokyo, and Podgorica.
The exhibition, curated by
Dijana Vucinic and
Anna Kats, aims to significantly expand her representation within the architectural canon by exhibiting the highlights of her built work for the first time: the Hotel Podgorica (1964-1967) and the Hotel Zlatibor (1979-1981), with expansive public spaces that welcomed both locals and visitors to commingle in environments that made socialist broadly luxury accessible; the Petrovac Apartment Building (1967), with its sculptural façade and expansive apartment layouts; as well as the Monument to Fallen Fighters at Barutana (1980), a sculptural memorial landscape that commemorates local anti-fascist fighters.
“Radević subverted hierarchies that privilege cosmopolitan centers over provincial peripheries by locating her personal practice in Montenegro. Yet her architecture was ultimately supranational, simultaneously digesting vernacular building traditions as well as her global study and work experience. By positing how to re-center a historical figure and geopolitical context that have long been at the peripheral fringes of architecture’s normative history, this exhibition recovers her distinctive role as a negotiator of the spatial contract—between state and citizenry, between center and periphery—as a case study in facilitating social consensus and cultural exchange for contemporary practitioners.”
Dijana Vucinic and Anna Kats.
