In a 1976 photograph, twenty-seven-year-old artist Željko Jerman kneels on the sidewalk in front of Belgrade’s Student Cultural Center (SKC), applying photo fixer to a large roll of photographic paper to write in stark, imperfect letters: “Ovo nije moj svijet” (“This is not my world”) in Croatian. The banner’s crude, handmade quality contrasts sharply with official messaging typical of public spaces, further highlighted by rough pieces of brick weighing it down. Soon displayed on the building’s façade before being promptly removed by gallery administration, the work raises provocative questions: What does this strange statement mean? How should we understand a personal declaration of alienation exhibited publicly? What does the banner tell us about the relationship between individual expression and collective ideology in late socialist Yugoslavia?

These questions frame Adair Rounthwaite’s exploration of experimental art practices in Zagreb from the mid-1970s to early 1980s in This Is Not My World: Art and Public Space in Socialist Zagreb. The artworks she examines occupy a conceptual space defined by terminological constellations gathered around introspection (intimate, subjective, warm, emotional, vulnerable), informality (lazy, messy, hippie-like, imperfect, unpolished, disposable), and ambiguity (ambivalent, relational, nonproductive, resistant, peripheral). Against the backdrop of Yugoslavia’s own ambiguous position in the Cold War—expelled from the socialist bloc in 1948 and developing a “third way” through self-management socialism and nonalignment—Rounthwaite suggests that these practices occupied a parallel middle ground between conceptualism as a movement and conceptualism as a more generalized tendency that continues to inform art to this day.

The book focuses primarily on the Group of Six Authors (Grupa šestorice autora)—brothers Mladen and Sven Stilinović, Boris Demur, Vlado Martek, Željko Jerman, and Fedor Vučemilović, with additional attention to two other figures adjacent to the group, Vlasta Delimar and Tomislav Gotovac. These artists were part of the broader movement named New Art Practice, a flexible, politically astute conceptualism initiated in the late 1960s. Through close readings of artworks and performances, Rounthwaite explores the dialectic between intimacy and public space, which she relates to the dynamics of individual subjectivity and collectivity in late socialism. At the heart of this dynamic was the staging of deeply personal interventions in various public settings. When Mladen Stilinović hung banners declaring his love for his partner, art historian Branka Stipančić, during official May Day celebrations, or when Jerman created body imprints on photographic paper at a public bathing area, they inserted intimate experiences into spaces designated for collective socialist life. These juxtapositions, Rounthwaite argues, pointed to the fundamental tensions of Yugoslavia’s socialism—a system promising collective emancipation while being increasingly weighed down by bureaucratic strictures. The artists analyzed in the book neither positioned themselves in straightforward opposition to the public sphere nor fully embraced it, instead inhabiting an ambiguous middle ground where intimate subjectivity and collective identity remained in productive tension. By making this tension visible through deliberately messy, vulnerable, handmade interventions, they offered not a political program but an experiential critique—highlighting how spaces nominally designated as “public” were layered with contradictory meanings that no single ideological framework could contain.

The book unfolds across four thematic chapters progressively building its argument about art, space, and subjectivity in socialist Zagreb. Chapter one analyzes the Group of Six Authors’ “exhibition-actions” (izložbe-akcije) organized between 1975 and 1979 in various public spaces. These events, in which artists displayed works, performed actions, and engaged with passersby, took place in locations ranging from Zagreb’s central Republic Square to the Adriatic coast to Venice’s Piazza San Marco. Rounthwaite contends that these exhibition-actions functioned as critical explorations of the possibilities and limitations of public space under socialism, with the artists performing what she calls a studied “laziness” that implicitly challenged socialist notions of productivity. Chapter two examines Martek’s and Mladen Stilinović’s use of language to interrogate pedagogical structures and ideological frameworks through childlike approaches that resist normative communication. Martek’s “pre-poetry” emphasized writing tools’ materiality to explore creativity and subjectivity, while Stilinović responded to the post-1968 political climate by fragmenting institutional discourse into individual, embodied experiences. Chapter three focuses on Jerman’s experimental photography, especially on his magnum opus My Year, 1977, a year-long documentation of his daily life, to analyze how he made photographic development into a performative process connecting to questions of mortality and the living body. The chapter also explores his collaborative performances with his one-time partner Vlasta Delimar, which interrogated gender relations and communication. Finally, chapter four turns to Delimar herself and to Tomislav Gotovac, to analyze how they used their naked bodies to engage with kitsch in public performances that challenged social norms and questioned gendered subjectivity. Both artists, the author suggests, mobilized kitsch aesthetics to create experiences for audiences that combined familiarity with the strange, the obscure, and the erotic.

Drawing on her dual expertise in North American and East European conceptualism, Rounthwaite offers richly nuanced interpretations that skillfully situate these Zagreb artists within the broader international landscape of conceptual art. This comparative dimension is arguably the book’s most valuable contribution, as Rounthwaite studiously brings the works of Zagreb artists in dialogue with those from both East and West. Among many illuminating insights, she contrasts the Group of Six Authors’ deliberately uncultivated self-presentation with the slick professionalism of Western conceptualists to draw out differences in their relationship to formal education and official institutions. For example, like several other members of the group, Mladen Stilinović had no formal art degrees, and he self-consciously sought to make and distinguish art with simplicity and “warmth” from the polished professionalism and the luxurious production values of Western conceptualism (46). Simultaneously, the Zagreb artists operated differently from their counterparts in other socialist countries. Rather than retreating completely into unofficial spaces or developing strictly oppositional practices, they occupied an ambiguous zone: occasionally supported by official institutions like the City Gallery of Contemporary Art or students’ cultural centers, or occasionally claiming informal spaces, they positioned themselves on the margins of official culture, neither at its center nor fully outside of it.

In the book’s conclusion, Rounthwaite mentions that their lack of formal education prevented the group’s members from joining the official artists’ union and acquiring the associated social benefits like pensions. At the turn of the 1980s, however, grassroots advocacy brought artists without degrees and those working in nontraditional media into the union’s fold. They were also given a space, the Gallery of Expanded Media (PM Gallery), where Mladen Stilinović eventually found employment. Did these changes in status have any effect on the artists’ work? It is intriguing to ponder what kind of interpretations might have arisen from a more systematic consideration of the artists’ position in Yugoslavia’s art system. Take Stilinović’s Submit to Public Debate (1980), perhaps the most openly political work discussed in the book, consisting of fragmented ideological phrases displayed in front of a set of empty chairs. Rounthwaite convincingly analyzes it as a critique of self-management’s increasing bureaucratization, but from what experience did it arise? Is it possible that it was not just a critique of bureaucracy, but also a comment on the artist’s own exclusion from self-management? Indeed, how did artists who deliberately positioned themselves on the margins of official institutions support their work in the near absence of an art market? Even if their production was undemanding materially, how did their labor reproduce itself? In her recent book Art Work: Invisible Labour and the Legacy of Yugoslav Socialism (University of Toronto Press, 2021), cultural sociologist Katja Praznik shows that it was precisely the artists associated with New Art Practice who raised questions about compensation for artistic labor, not least in the context of the self-organized gallery Podroom, which included members of the Group of Six Authors. Could we see this effort as a form of genuine self-management, offering an alternative to bureaucratic practices? Questions of material existence were clearly important to these artists themselves; although not the central focus of Rounthwaite’s study of art and public space, they offer promising directions for building upon her already extensive research.

Despite these questions, This Is Not My World: Art and Public Space in Socialist Zagreb stands as a signal contribution to our understanding of experimental art in socialist Europe. Rounthwaite meticulously attends to the materiality and spatiality of artworks, offers nuanced readings of performance documentation, and consistently highlights the shifting valences of public space. The book’s greatest virtue lies in its careful navigation of the “in-between” position these Zagreb artists occupied: neither fully aligned with Western conceptualism nor fitting neatly into narratives of dissident art in Eastern Europe; neither fully institutionalized nor opposed to institutions; neither pioneers of conceptualism nor the generations for whom it became normalized, as just another mode of practice. By illuminating this multifaceted middle ground, Rounthwaite expands our understanding of conceptual art’s global development beyond dominant Western narratives and provides a model for approaching other ambiguous contexts that resist binary Cold War frameworks. In a field where book-length studies of Yugoslav art remain relatively rare, her work opens valuable pathways for future scholarship on this rich and still-underexplored artistic legacy.