Bio

Vuk Dautović is an art historian from Belgrade, PhD candidate, and research assistant at the Department of Art History, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade. His area of research is the visual culture of the Balkan lands with respect to the Jewish visual culture and the domain of sacral art, first and foremost the ritual objects.

Project

The Pyrenees and the Balkans: Balkan Jews through Modern Spanish Visual Media. Mutual Exchanges and Communication (Late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century)

The core idea of the project is the study of the mutual cultural perceptions and views from the Iberian Peninsula of the Balkan Sephardic Jewish communities during the period of their emancipation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The project will study the images of the Balkans and the representations of Sephardic Jews observed in the Spanish public sphere of the period, focusing in art history and visual culture. An important aspect of this project is the observation of the way in which the Spanish public observed and represented the Balkans in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century. It will strive to determine the dominant narratives as a possibility of forming mutual connections, reception, and modalities of exchange, primarily of visual patterns between these two regions framing the European continent. The project is directed towards the study of the representations and images of Balkan Jews and their distribution and exchange between Spain and the Balkans, aiming at establishing the typology, contexts and scope of images and the visual material whose topic, in the wider sense, is related to representations of the Balkans, and in the narrower sense, related to the Sephardic population in the Balkans, but also their joint critical analysis. This can shape the representation of exiled Sephardic Jews in the contemporary public sphere, who were identified with the Balkan space, and also their potential recognition as “Spaniards of the Balkans.”