The question “Who has the right to contemporaneity?” is a central concern in the work of Saša Asentić. While challenging dominant narratives that exclude certain communities, it examines whose experiences, bodies, and histories are acknowledged as part of the contemporary moment. Rather than treating contemporaneity as a neutral or universally accessible condition, Asentić understands it as a contested space of struggle and negotiation.
In 2005, during a residency at the Centre national de la danse in Paris as part of the Theorem Dance Residence project, Asentić began researching the history of dance in Serbia in the 20th century. In 2006, he invited Ana Vujanović, who contributed a theoretical framework informed by Walter Benjamin’s and Michel Foucault’s approaches to history. Together, they conducted a series of video interviews that year and created the Tiger’s Leap into the Past (Evacuated Genealogy) project.
The interviews were edited by Dragana B. Stevanović and translated into English by Goran Bogunović. The project was first publicly presented in February 2007 as a video installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art Vojvodina in Novi Sad within Asentić’s “Indigo Dance” (2005-2009) artistic-research project.
Tiger’s Leap into the Past (Evacuated Genealogy) aims to reconstruct the history of contemporary dance in Serbia during the 20th century up until it was established as an artistic discipline in the 1990s. This history, primarily shaped through interviews, does not follow a linear chronology, nor is it narrated by a single historian. Instead, it unfolds rhizomatically, as interviewees recall predecessors, collaborators, teachers, and students, who were then also interviewed, expanding and making more complex ‘historical images’ as an investment in contemporaneity.
Interviewees:
Katalin Ladik, Nada Kokotović, Sonja Vukićević, Dubravka Maletić, Nela Antonović, Svenka Savić, Jovan Ćirilov, Vladimir Kopicl, Ljubiša Ristić, Haris Pašović, and Boris Kovač.
Recycle Bin – Archiving Performances at the Edge of the Void functions as both a digression and a critical appendix to Tiger’s Leap into the Past. It archives memories of dance projects in Serbia that were never realized, offering a critical perspective on absence as a form of presence. Recycle Bin was created in collaboration with video artist Marta Popivoda.
Interviewees:
Katalin Ladik, Bojana Cvejić, Jovan Ćirilov, Vladimir Kopicl, Olivera Kovačević-Crnjanski, Dušan Murić, Sonja Vukićević, Dragana Alfirević, and Nela Antonović.
As artistic research projects, Tiger’s Leap into the Past and Recycle Bin function not only as acts of preservation but, more importantly, as tools for critical reflection in contexts shaped by systemic forgetting. They address the amnesia surrounding cultural production in the former Yugoslavia and open opportunities for re-examining the legacy of dance as an art form intertwined with collective memory, identity, and social transformation.
Tiger’s Leap into the Past (Evacuated Genealogy) was produced by Per.Art in Novi Sad.