Sandra Uskokovic
Sandra Uskokovic is a scholar of modern and contemporary Central and Eastern European Art. She holds a position of Full Professor at the University of Dubrovnik (Croatia).
She holds M.A degree from George Washington University (USA) and Ph.D. degree from University of Zagreb (Croatia).
Her international experience circumvents research fellowships at ICCROM ; UNESCO and US/ICOMOS.
She is an author of four books - Modern Heritage of Dubrovnik; Contemporary Design in Historic Settings; Spatial Contextualism and Sensibility in Modern Croatian Architecture; Art Dialogues in Public Space (2018) - and has written and published numerous conference papers and research articles in her home country and abroad. She was visiting scholar at many universities in Europe, Asia and USA. Her primary research interests are: art criticism, architecture, heritage, modern and contemporary art, urban and cultural theory, performative arts.
Participant of CAA-Getty International Program, Visiting Research Fellow at Humboldt University (Institute for Visual History) and University College of London (Institute of Advanced Studies).
She holds M.A degree from George Washington University (USA) and Ph.D. degree from University of Zagreb (Croatia).
Her international experience circumvents research fellowships at ICCROM ; UNESCO and US/ICOMOS.
She is an author of four books - Modern Heritage of Dubrovnik; Contemporary Design in Historic Settings; Spatial Contextualism and Sensibility in Modern Croatian Architecture; Art Dialogues in Public Space (2018) - and has written and published numerous conference papers and research articles in her home country and abroad. She was visiting scholar at many universities in Europe, Asia and USA. Her primary research interests are: art criticism, architecture, heritage, modern and contemporary art, urban and cultural theory, performative arts.
Participant of CAA-Getty International Program, Visiting Research Fellow at Humboldt University (Institute for Visual History) and University College of London (Institute of Advanced Studies).
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The book Anamneses: Dialogues of Art in Public Spaces, synthesizes current urban culture starting with an agonistic society characterized by an inquiry of existing consensus and by disagreement between past and present, in order to be used as a heuristic tool for better understanding of the role of cultural particularization as opposed to globalization and other transnational processes connected with urban culture.
The book is divided into nine chapters covering theoretical, investigatory and practical approaches to documenting and acting in public spaces and city, using various art formats.
Logic of selected works doesn't always reflect a quality of works or a place of their positioning, but also the way those works and the place (location) itself interact with each other in a new and novel way. Selected artists managed to avoid not only restrictions of art conventions, but also restrictions of traditional and institutional spaces and their products such as museums and galleries. This art insists on relocation of the center of gravity from universal tendencies of modernists' abstraction to the reality of "ordinary" people and their "common" experiences in public spaces.
The book Anamneses: Dialogues of Art in Public Spaces is a critical inquiry of the culture of space and of economic exploitation of public spaces in order to show a wide span of art practices that enable citizens to become co-creators of public spaces. Illustrated with selected examples in this book, contemporary art in public spaces creates a particular point of view on collective culture and its affirmation in urban life. The book explores ways in which art interventions and practices transform and symbolically shape public spaces, that is to say ways in which they participate and change the meaning of public spaces, where users could feel in a different way experimental character of sensory experience.
The first chapter describes and analyses his student period in Prague, his return and stay in native Split up to 1940, departure to Dubrovnik during war time, and then again his return to Split by mid 1950s' where he worked until his death.
The beginning of second chapter addresses architect' bibliography that elaborates the following theoretical themes: cost-effective architecture, industrialisation, the role of the architect in modern society, and research and achievements in modern engineering. Second chapter furthermore circumvents architectural and social scene in Croatia and Czech Republic that overlaps with architect' Perkovic profesional engagement. A special emphasis was given to the interwar and postwar period of mediteraneean cities Split and Dubrovnik, where Perkovic spent most of his life, thus absorbing the local influences and conditions, that he entailed into his own specific architectural language.
Third chapter presents historic and architectural analysis of the entire Perkovic' work. His work is classified according to architectural typology, along with the description and analysis of each work, that is explained along with its historic and social context.
The fourth and the last chapter compares entire Perkovic' work with respect to the chronologically parallel and relevant national, european and worlwide movements in architecture, in order to place and evaluate his work in a broader context. The critical analysis with respect to the historical perspective has proven that Lovro Perkovic' architecture has been anthropocentric, modest in form' articulation, functional but intimate. The idiosyncratic work of this architect evidences the versatility of architectural creation and conceptualisation of modern and contemporary architecture, in which he managed to combine tradition and avantgarde, art and technology, economics and aesthetics, and individuality and collectiveness, as the main contributing factors for modern life and society. Lovro Perkovic was a truly contemporary architect, who had recognized the importance of contextual architecture and envisioned space as aesthetic phenomenon. Through his entire professional life he was looking for the balance between economics and aesthetics in architecture, thus defining the isue of aesthetics, as the one, but not the only, sole aspect of the architecture.
Key words: modernism, functionalism, traditional Mediteraneean architecture, collective type buildings, urbanism, avangarde, economical and rational building, technology, contextualism.