Dr Tijana Stevanovic

Research summary

My research is situated at the intersection of architectural history, cultural studies, critical theory, and art criticism, focusing on the questions of technology, labour, and social agency in architectural design. My PhD thesis (PhD awarded in 2019) titled ‘Incorporating Self-management: Architectural Production in New Belgrade’, mobilised contingency of the self-management’s culturally modified parameters of individual and collective agency to critically revisit the often too-easily assumed positions of the authorship in architectural design. It advocated that latter be recast in terms of processes, instead of products. 

Previously, I was an affiliate researcher to the 'Architecture in Effect: Rethinking the Social in Architecture', a Strong Research Environment funded by the Swedish Research Council Formas 2011-2016. As one of the outcomes my contribution will be published in the upcoming edited book Rethinking the Social in Architecture (Actar, 2018);

My interest in inflections of individual authorship in architectural practice, and the figure of the architect as worker resulted in the texts published in edited volumes: Re-Framing Identities, Architecture’s Turn to History,1970-1990  (Birkäuser de Gruyter, 2016); Industries of Architecture (Routledge, 2015); Pedagogies of Disaster (Punctum books, 2013).

My practice also involves art collaborations and curatorial projects, which explore knowledge classification and institutionalisation of critique in creative processes. 

With the fellow Bartlett scholar, Sophie Read, I led a project which proposed a feminist practice of architectural history, involving embodied intervention with the past. ‘Overpainting that jostles’ was exhibited as the installation at KTH Stockholm, 2016, and is published in the edited volume Architecture and Feminisms (Routledge, 2018). 

I was part of the artist collective, Feminist Healthcare Research Group, which sought to expand the understanding of  the growing sense of exhaustion in art and culture production, by engaging with Berlin collectives that concern themselves with alternative care practices, exhibited in installation/performance ’Sick Leave’ in District, Berlin, 2015 and a zine Turning Illness into a Weapon, 2015. 

With Peter Merrington I led curatorial platform which engaged PhD students of different disciplines with the communal archive of the legendary Byker Estate, Newcastle designed by Ralph Erskine. Through the film, podcast, an installation (Baltic 39, Newcastle, 2014) and the publication ‘A Partial Index’  (2015) the project addressed the autobiographical testimony’s claim to authenticity. 

Through the lecture performance, video installation and artist’s book my project ‘I am too sad to dissent’  (Flutgraben, Berlin, 2013) observed the position of the occupant of the former Berlin Wall’s Watchtower as a place of stuttering and hesitation, where violence of instrumental reason meets the powerlessness of the individual architect.

Education

University of Belgrade

Masters, Graduate Engineer in Architecture |

University College London

Masters, Identity, Culture and Power |

The Higher Education Academy

Award, The Higher Education Academy Fellow |

Newcastle University

Doctorate, Doctor of Philosophy | 2019

Publications

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