Editors' Note

The contemporary moment of the first quarter of the 21st century is marked by a complex, not entirely visible, and permanent process of the marginalization of art. This process calls into question the privileged position of art, which has long been tied to its dominant function, the representation of power. Originating from the traditional system of art (representation of the power of the church, state), this function, in various modifications, also characterized the 20th century. The representation of political, ideological, imperial, or colonial power (e.g., Nazi art, socialist realism, capitalist realism, abstract expressionism) served the purpose of “aestheticizing politics” (Walter Benjamin). During the Cold War, art was regarded as a “soft power” and was promoted, funded, and imposed by various power hubs. At the same time, the 20th century was marked by numerous avant-garde artistic practices, united in their critique of the reduction of art to the representation of power. It is from such critiques that the contemporary art paradigm of the 1960s emerged.

With the arrival of the 21st century, globalization, and the tension between digital and fossil capitalism, a shift occurs that may be linked to the marginalization of art. Conversely, since artwork prices in the art market have reached astronomical levels, one could conclude the opposite: that there has never been more money (and power) in art than today. However, this seems to be more related to capital, the development of new financial derivatives, and monetization rather than art itself. Supporting this idea is the fact that artists' positions are increasingly aligned with the most socially vulnerable groups, especially in economically underdeveloped areas, where the art market has not yet been established.

Currently, power is detaching itself from politics and no longer needs representation, as it shifts into the hybrid hubs of a networked world. The digital post-informational paradigm we live in – where information and attention are treated as capital – normalizes marginalization, extending beyond art to include creative and critical thinking.

In light of these processes of marginalization, several questions emerge regarding the role of art in the complex, networked world of the 21st century: What changes in contemporary art can be observed today amid emerging multipolarity? Has the critical potential of art been equated with activism across social spheres, or is it entirely on hold, considering that in recent decades, art has increasingly been associated with entertainment, blockbuster works, commodification, and technological innovations – factors that contribute to the blurring and masking of its marginalization process? How are current changes – such as the deepening ecological crisis, the emergence of AI technologies, the impacts of the Anthropocene, and other challenges that question the concept of the human – connected to the process of marginalizing art in the 21st century?

This issue, titled The Marginalization of Art: A Permanent, Complex, and Ongoing Process, compiles a series of interdisciplinary essays that examine the changing landscapes of contemporary art, theory, curatorial practice, and cultural labor within the broader context of digital mediatization, posthumanism, and socio-political critique. The authors approach these topics from different geographical backgrounds and various critical perspectives, including feminist theory, media studies, digital aesthetics, institutional critique, and political economy. Together, the contributions analyze how the margins of artistic discourse – whether historical, material, ideological, or geographic – are being reshaped by technological infrastructures, platform algorithms, and cultural power structures.

In “How Else Can We Think About Art? Aesthetics, Technosphere, and the Post-Metaphysical Image”, Žarko Paić challenges the viability of traditional aesthetic categories in the age of the technosphere and artificial intelligence. Paić proposes a new conceptual language – figurality, aisthesis, and visualization – as tools for understanding how art functions within a reality increasingly shaped by algorithmic processes and machine-driven creativity. These terms create space for rethinking sensory experience, image-making, and the ontology of artistic events beyond human intentionality. Drawing on a broad theoretical lineage – from Martin Heidegger’s critique of technology to Gilles Deleuze’s ontology of becoming – this essay situates contemporary art within a larger transformation where the boundaries between the human, the machine, and the artwork dissolve. Paić asks us to consider how artificial intelligence, digital images, and post-biological forms of creativity redefine not only the practice of art but also the very conditions through which we perceive, interpret, and value it.

In “Performance and Protest: Questions on Art and Life”, Jasmina Čubrilo examines the critical potential of the body as both artistic medium and political agent, tracing continuities between performance art and civic protest from the 1960s to the present. Through close readings of works by Marina Abramović, Tanja Ostojić, and Ivana Ivković, she shows how female artists have used endurance, exposure, and vulnerability to confront systems of power, negotiate institutional frameworks, and question the limits of agency. Čubrilo extends this analysis to recent student and civic protests in Serbia, where collective bodily acts such as silence, marches, and endurance performances of protest blur the line between art and life. The essay argues that performance art not only anticipates but also informs contemporary forms of resistance, offering paradigms for activism and social change.

In “Marginalized Code: Feminist Interventions in AI Art,” Jelena Guga examines the AI art through feminist theory, critical data studies, and media history. The essay argues that artificial intelligence systems are not only technical artefacts but also sociocultural constructs heavily influenced by gendered power dynamics, epistemic violence, and labor exploitation. Guga places the AI art within a broader feminist tradition of resisting technological marginalization and advocates for feminist intervention as a crucial epistemological and aesthetic practice. The main argument asserts that feminist critique should go beyond simply spotting bias in AI systems and should focus on reimagining the infrastructural, epistemic, and emotional foundations of technology. Guga shows how the feminist AI art challenges the prevailing narratives of neutrality, objectivity, and innovation. The paper also links these practices to the historical continuity with the feminist media art and cyberfeminism of the 1990s and 2000s, highlighting how early digital artists critically engaged with identity, embodiment, and representation. 

“A Critical Examination of Emotional Labor and Emotional Capital in Social Media Interaction” by Fuat Boğaç Evren explores how users’ emotional expressions on social media are turned into emotional capital, revealing the exploitative mechanisms of algorithmic control and affective labor in digital spaces. Through a critical analysis of user behavior on social media platforms, the paper questions how emotional expression becomes a form of unpaid digital labor – generating algorithmic visibility, social capital, and ultimately, economic value for platforms. The author argues that the digital emotional labor is central to the modern platform capitalism, as users perform emotional work not for wages but for attention, engagement, and symbolic validation. This labor is managed by algorithms that amplify specific emotional performances and content types, resulting in an uneven distribution of emotional capital. The study presents social networks as new fields of power where digital subjects compete for visibility and status under unequal conditions.

In “To Fail Better: Curating as a Resilience Practice”, Jovanka Popova Unkovska critically reimagines curatorial work as an act of resistance against institutional, ideological, and economic limitations. Popova presents failure not as a weakness but as a radical strategy of resilience, solidarity, and subversion within the contemporary cultural production. At the core of the essay is a challenge to curatorial norms embedded in neoliberal frameworks that prioritize visibility, productivity, and aestheticized activism. Instead, Popova advocates for a model of curating-as-care, rooted in vulnerability, inproductivity, and mutual support – a practice that actively resists cooptation by market and state forces. The essay examines how contemporary institutions – especially museums – often instrumentalize marginalization, exploiting precarious artistic labor while aestheticizing politics. Popova criticizes the fetishization of activist art and identity-based struggles that are broken into funding-friendly projects, stripping them of systemic political impact and exposing the contradictions faced by intellectuals and curators when their work becomes commodified.

Expanding on historical continuity, Milica Pekić, in her essay titled “Engaged Art Practice and Institutional Change: A Brief Introduction to Art Experiments in Yugoslavia and Serbia from 1968 to the Present”, traces a lineage of engaged artistic practices in Yugoslavia and Serbia from the 1968 student protests to the present-day student-led movement. She positions art as an essential tool in the struggle for institutional critique, social transformation, and collective emancipation. The paper describes how artists and curators over decades have consistently challenged the capitalist logic and hierarchical structures of dominant art institutions by experimenting with participation, collective authorship, democratic self-governance, and alternative modes of production. Pekić highlights a key conceptual shift from “artwork” to “art labor” and critiques the invisibility and devaluation of artistic labor under neoliberal systems, linking it to broader struggles for democratic restructuring, solidarity, and economic justice. The study concludes with the current wave of student protests in Serbia, which have reclaimed institutional spaces and reignited avant-garde legacies. Art, in this context, becomes a means of collective resistance and reimagination – not just as aesthetic production, but as a social force capable of reshaping public life.

In “Framing the Margins: Representation of the Working Class in Contemporary Serbian Visual and Cinematic Art”, authors Maja Petrović and Ana Filipović examine how the working class is depicted in visual and cinematic forms in post-socialist Serbia. They focus on how art both reflects and critiques the increasing socio-economic marginalization since the country’s shift to capitalism. Using an interdisciplinary approach rooted in the social history of art, the paper analyzes key case studies – including films like Working Class Heroes (2022) and Working Class Goes to Hell (2023), along with socially engaged artworks by Milica Ružičić. The authors explore how realism, often seen as an outdated style, reemerges as a powerful, politically charged method capable of reaching wider audiences and addressing real class struggles. The study also highlights stylistic variations – from documentary realism to genre blending and camp aesthetics – raising important questions about the communication power and boundaries of different representational styles. At the heart of the analysis is the question of agency: how much contemporary art and cinema not only portray but also envision resistance and collective action among the working classes.

In “Residual Aesthetics: Rethinking Zoran Todorović’s Warmth against the Benchmark of the Anthropocene”, Danica Đorđević Janković offers a deep critical analysis of Zoran Todorović’s artwork Warmth, a large-scale installation made of industrially processed human hair collected from various institutional and social settings. Moving beyond traditional biopolitical interpretations, the author situates the piece within the context of the Anthropocene, posthuman theory, and the aesthetics of waste and abjection. Discarded hair becomes a central medium – abject and residual, both personal and anonymous, biological and symbolic – through which Todorović questions the mechanisms of surveillance, disposability, and social marginalization. Addressing necropolitics, ungrievability, and the crisis of the posthuman subject, the essay presents Warmth as a powerful case study of how contemporary art can embody resistance through abjection and material decay. The installation serves as a space for redefining life, death, and aesthetic value – not as fixed categories but as contested fields shaped by ecological collapse, algorithmic governance, and social exclusion.

In addition to the main theme, this issue features two important contributions that, although outside the primary curatorial focus, provide valuable insights into architecture, exhibition history, and digital art practices in Southeast Asia. “Women in the Modern Movement: Léonie Geisendorf and Architectural Practice in Mid-20th Century Europe” by Şölen Köseoğlu offers a feminist curatorial and historiographic intervention into modernist architecture, highlighting a historically marginalized figure in Swedish modernism and reflecting on how exhibition-making can reshape gendered histories. Using archival and ethnographic research, she uncovers the contributions of this overlooked figure and discusses how museums can serve as platforms for institutional memory and gender reparation. Meanwhile, “From Margins to Algorithms: Mediatization of Yogyakarta Visual Art on Instagram” by Nadiyah Tunnikmah presents an ethnographic study of how Yogyakarta’s visual art scene is mediatized on Instagram, showing how platform logic influences cultural production and professional artistic practices. Her work examines how the algorithmic shaping of artistic creation, distribution, and self-representation affects the cultural and professional realities of visual artists in Indonesia.

Together, these contributions challenge the idea that technological mediation automatically democratizes art or labor. Instead, they reveal how new systems of visibility, value, and exclusion are embedded within digital infrastructures and cultural institutions. Whether through the AI-generated aesthetics, reappropriated realism, feminist data practices, or Instagram-based self-curation, the artists and theorists in this volume show the complex nature of mediation in our current moment – both expanding and limiting, freeing and extracting. By emphasizing critical, situated, and speculative approaches, this issue rethinks the role of art and theory in a world increasingly influenced by algorithms, automation, and economic instability. It encourages readers to think about not only how art is evolving because of these forces but also how art can actively shape more ethical, inclusive, and freeing cultural futures.

Guest Issue Editors: Dr Maja Stanković and Dr Jovan Čekić, Faculty of Media and Communications, Belgrade, Serbia

Reviewers: Nurhayatu Nufut Alimin (Faculty of Art and Design, Universitas Sebelas Maret, Indonesia), Sarah Rosalena Brady (University of California, Santa Barbara, Center for Responsible Machine Learning Affiliated Faculty), Juan Manuel Rodríguez Caso (CyAD, Autonomous Metropolitan University, Xochimilco Unit, Mexico), Danica Čigoja Piper (Faculty of Media and Communication, Singidunum University, Belgrade, Serbia), Nikola Dedić (Faculty of Music, University of Arts, Belgrade, Serbia), Danica Đorđević Janković (Museum of Naïve and Marginal Art, Belgrade, Serbia), Amalia Foka (Department of Fine Arts & Art Sciences, University of the Ioannina, Greece), Mónica Guáqueta (Department of History and Theory of Architecture and Communication Techniques, Teaching Center: Barcelona School of Architecture – ETSAB, Spain), Sonja Jankov (Faculty of Dramatic Arts, University of Arts in Belgrade, Serbia), Joscelyn Jurich (Adjunct Lecturer of Media Studies, New York University), Milena Jokanović (Art History Department, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade), Ying Ma (Anhui University, Hefei, Anhui; Communication University of China, Beijing, China), Rafaela Nunes (Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon and collaborator at ITI/LARSyS), Renzo Filinich Orozco (Origins Centre, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa), Magda Szcześniak (Institute of Polish Culture, University of Warsaw, University of Warsaw, Poland), Elizabeth K. Thomson (University for the Creative Arts, Farnham, United Kingdom), Sophie Toupin (Department of Information and Communication, Laval University, Quebec City, Canada)

On the cover: DAH Teatar, Za tvoje dobro (For Your Own Good). Photo: Đorđe Tomić