Marwa Arsanios • Lela Čermak • Dora Economou • Vlatka Horvat • Yota Ioannidou • Sanja Iveković • Adela Jušić • Gülsün Karamustafa • Rajkamal Kahlon • Theo Prodromidis • Marta Popivoda and Ana Vujanović • Mujeres Públicas • Želimir Žilnik •

Titled after a verse from the poem May 25^th (1978) by poet, actress and anarchist Katerina Gogou (1940–1993), the exhibition I’ll open the door straight, dead straight into the fire starts from the role women partisans played throughout the intertwined histories of Yugoslav and Greek antifascist struggles, as well as the post-war constellation of the Cold War. The exhibition looks at common histories and experiences of victories and defeats, reencountering various temporalities of revolutionary female engagement and relating them to wider liberation and anticolonial struggles and contemporary feminist demands for a total social alternative.

The exhibition was created in a dialogue with iLiana Fokianaki and in collaboration with the State of Concept Athens. In order to reflect further on the legacies of anti-fascist and other forms of emancipatory resistance, the Zagreb version of the exhibition has been expanded to include several local artistic and activist positions who have been engaged in researching those topics.

The exhibition inserts itself into the complex social landscape of Yugoslav-Greek relations, which are situated in similar, yet historically differentiated political positions at the European semi-periphery, and whose histories of antifascist resistance—led and inspired by communist ideas—went in abrupt directions.

In both countries, the recent repatriarchization of society is one of the many side-effects of political crises relating to their vassal position within the European Union, resulting in abolishing workers’ rights, pauperization, rising racism and fascism. The exhibition does not see the figure of the woman partisan as a heroic trope of salvation or a footnote of histories written once upon a time, but as a principle of praxis guiding the present.