The phenomenon of youth alternative pop culture in Belgrade during the late 1970s and early 1980s, that of the last generation that spent its youth in socialist Yugoslavia, is the focus of the exhibition entitled The Last Youth in Yugoslavia, the first exhibition of 2012 at the 25. Maj Museum in Belgrade.

The people behind the exhibition are art historian Marina Martić and art theorist Stevan Vuković.

The exhibition comprises photographs, video material, TV programmes, magazines, fanzines, posters, and comic books from the period between 1977 to 1984. Together they bring the atmosphere and the spirit of the times which gave birth to an artistic movement to life which, later on, began to be referred to as the “New Wave.”

“This was a huge step for the museum because it sends a message that the job of the Museum of Yugoslav History is not only the political history of any given period of the twentieth century, but also the shifts in the society that teetered between alternative and mainstream. In fact, this is an attempt to modernise the Museum of Yugoslav History,” said the museum director Katarina Živanovic in an interview with Southeast Europe: People and Culture.

According to the curators of the exhibition, even though the initial idea was to present alternative youth cultures from all over the former Yugoslavia, the quantity of relevant material that still has not been processed is so immense that there was no way it could adequately be represented.

“The title for the exhibition was taken from an album of the Krstić-Šaper (1987) duo, with kind permission from the members who, at the time, were former members of the Belgrade-based cult band Idoli. However, we wanted this exhibition to be a Yugoslav one but we did not have sufficient funds. This is why I hope that our exhibition will inspire others to continue the research we initiated with our ‘Belgrade episode,’” said Marina Martić and added that this was the last authentic youth scene in Yugoslavia which was not affected by nationalism.

“Niko, niko kao ja” (Nobody, nobody like me) were the lyrics sung by Milan Mladenović in the 1980s accompanied by the base player Dušan Kojić Koja and drummer Ivica Vidović Vid. Their band Šarlo Akrobata existed for only a year but, nevertheless, shook the Yugoslav music scene at the time. Besides Šarlo, bands such as Ekatarina Velika, Idoli, Električni Orgazam, Pekinška Patka, Via Talas, Bezobrazno Zeleno, Bulevar, U Škripcu, and Radnička Kontrola, among others, belonged to the new wave in music and are now perceived as cult bands of the time. The exhibition focused on the time before these bands signed contracts with record labels and became part of mainstream.

In spite of the fact that the New Wave was a music genre first and foremost and that it sprang from punk rock as a reaction to the popular music of the 1970s, it was a much wider movement in Yugoslavia and produced work that was a hybrid of popular music, painting, theatre, film, fashion, photography, design, experimental TV programmes, and club life.

One of the phenomena was the emergence of “rock photography” by the famous Belgrade-based photographer Goranka Matić. Her photographs of cult personalities and events of the period are also included in the exhibition.

Right up to mid-1970s young people in Yugoslavia were consumers rather than active creators of cultural trends. Nevertheless, as is pointed out in the exhibition catalogue, “Young authors, encouraged by the liberties won by the world punk movement in 1970s, adopted new forms of cultural and artistic expression which found its watering hole at Studentski Kulturni Centar (SKC, Student Cultural Centre) in Belgrade.” At the time, SKC was a small institution but extremely open toward new and different approaches to culture and non-standard ways of employing classical artistic media.

Besides the exhibits from the collection of the Museum of Yugoslav History (25. May Museum), the exhibition also incorporates parts of programmes from the archives of Television Belgrade (now known as Radio Television Belgrade), the Student Cultural Centre, and material from private collections.