Conference ’Scene Artist – Miodrag Tabački: from Avant-Guarde to Baroque and Back Again’

On the occasion of the exhibition titled ’Starring Miodrag Tabački’ at display at the SASA Gallery of Science and Technology, the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade and the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts organize an international scientific conference at the SASA Grand Hall, on Wednesday, 19 April, starting at 10 a.m., which is dedicated to the SASA Corresponding Member Miodrag Tabački, one of our foremost set designers.

As observed by Dr Ivan Medenica, a full professor of the Faculty of Dramatic Arts and the chairman of the Conference Programme Board, along with Dejan Mijač, Tabački is the first stage artist, excluding playwrights, who became a member of the Academy, which symbolically pronounced theatre art equal to other arts.

’The title of the conference defined as ’Scene Artist – Miodrag Tabački: from Avant-Garde to Baroque and Back Again’ suggests a wide stylistic range of Tabački’s scenographies throughout his 50-year-long work, which is being marked by this exhibition and the conference. In the first panel, theoreticians from various fields, such as art history, theatre and culture studies, shall outline this stylistic range: from the first ten years of his work, characterized by the artistic birth inspired by the post-war avant-garde (the work of director Jerzy Grotowski and set designer Josef Svoboda, etc.) to a U-turn of the 1990s, toward a more baroque expression, interpreted as more of a typological feature (dynamics, hypertrophy, opulence, oneirism) rather than a stylistic-historical one. The second panel is conceived as a dialogue with directors, costume designers and playwrights from various backgrounds, with whom Tabački cooperated and realized some of his most renowned works,’ Dr Medenica stated in the event announcement.