Scientists

Sanja Horvatinčić, PhD

Research Associate
P. +385 1 6112 044
E. shorvat / ipu.hr
B. CRORIS profile

Biography

Sanja Horvatinčić is a Research Associate at the Institute of Art History in Zagreb, and an Honorary Fellow in the Department of Archaeology at Durham University. Her research focuses on the art and heritage of socialist and post-socialist Southeast Europe, bringing art-historical analysis into dialogue with critical heritage studies, memory studies, social anthropology, and contemporary archaeology. Her work spans archival and field research, digital methodologies, and curatorial practice, engaging questions of social justice through dissonant heritage.

She is interested in monuments both as state-sponsored projects deeply embedded in art and heritage institutions – and in the broader processes of modernity, capitalism, and nationalism they index – and as tools through which oppressed, dispossessed or marginalised communities materialise their own memories or contest dominant historical narratives. This dialectic becomes especially visible in the context of socialist states, such as Yugoslavia, where her research focuses on monuments and memorials dedicated to the People’s Liberation Struggle and the socialist revolution during the Second World War.

In her doctoral project (University of Zadar, 2017) Dr Horvatinčić built the first comprehensive georeferenced database of monuments, establishing a typological model for socialist-era memorials in Croatia and arguing that their formal heterogeneity reflects the specific dynamics of Yugoslav self-managed socialism. This foundational research has had various outputs, including journal articles, book chapters, and the landmark volume Shaping Revolutionary Memory: The Production of Monuments in Socialist Yugoslavia (Archive Books & Igor Zabel Association, 2023), co-edited with Beti Žerovc. This research programme also led to several curatorial interventions, including a contribution to the MoMA exhibition and award-winning catalogue Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980.

Her second major research programme deals with the memory of resistance, how it has been materialised in landscapes and cultural practices, and mobilised by historically marginalised communities to challenge hegemonic and revisionist narratives across the former Yugoslavia. Key projects in this strand include the community-based, interdisciplinary project Heritage from Below | Drežnica: Traces and Memories 1941–1945 (2019–2025), which brought together archaeological, ethnographic, counter-cartographic, and ecohistorical methods to investigate partisan sites and local memory practices in rural Croatia, and Tracing Oblivion: The Ustaše Concentration Camps on the Island of Pag, Croatia (2022–2023), which examined political and physical erasure of a Second World War concentration camp on the Adriatic coast. This research has been conducted with affected communitis and minority associations, primarily the Serbian National Council, and has been accompanied by Horvatinčić’s sustained public engagement, through curating exhibitions, designing programmes around critical heritage, public debates on memory politics, and media work.

Her broader interest in materiality, tracemaking, and the ‘right to memory’ has been developed through her leadership within the TRACTS COST Action (2021–2025), and her current involvement in HISTOFOR (University of Barcelona, 2025–2027), which critically reexamines the forensic turn. Her collaboration with Dr Marijana Hameršak, the leader of the ERIM project on irregularised migrations along the Balkan route, will result in the volume Border Deaths and Tracemaking: Between Commemorating and Countering (De Gruyter, 2026).

A third strand of her research addresses legacies of anticolonial entanglements and the cultural networks of the Non-Aligned Movement, grounded in fieldwork and archival research in Guinea-Bissau examining Yugoslav architectural and monument-making expertise through a decolonial lens. Her commitment to bridging decolonial theory and practice is reflected in collaborations with minority groups, civil society, and critical curatorial collectives, including the co-edited issue of GSG Magazine, Othering (in)(of) the Periphery / Drugost (na) periferiji(e), which gathered researchers, activists, and artists to critically engage with colonial heritage, race, and the politics of cultural production on the semi-periphery of Europe.

She develops and applies critical digital network and spatial methodologies for art history, currently as PI of the EU-funded DIGitART project (2023–2027), as part of which she organizes Digital Art History–Methods, Practices, Epistemologies conference series. She has taught Digital Art History at the postgraduate level at the University of Zadar. She also served as a Teaching Assistant in the Research Seminar Gender Politics and the Art of European Socialist States (Getty Foundation, 2019–2020), and has held guest lectures at universities in Austria, Germany, Slovenia, Spain, UK, and USA.

Edited Volumes

• Hameršak, M. and Horvatinčić, S. (eds.) (2026) Border Deaths and Tracemaking: Between Commemorating and Countering. Berlin: De Gruyter. (forthcoming)
• Horvatinčić, S. and Žerovc, B. (eds.) (2023) Shaping Revolutionary Memory: The Production of Monuments in Socialist Yugoslavia. Ljubljana/Berlin: Igor Zabel Association for Culture and Theory & Archive Books.
• Horvatinčić, S. and Kolešnik, Lj. (eds.) (2018) Modern and Contemporary Artists' Networks: An Inquiry into Digital History of Art and Architecture. Zagreb: Institute of Art History.

Selected Book Chapters

• Čeko, A. and Horvatinčić, S. (2026) “Countermapping the Heritage of Resistance.” In Counter-Cartographies of Trace, edited by M. Buchczyk, L. Douglas, and A. Joyce. Berlin: De Gruyter. (forthcoming)
• Horvatinčić, S. (2025) “Materialist Approaches to Monument-Making in Socialist Yugoslavia.”, in: Redefining Monuments: Materialist Memory Theories and Radical Heritage Practices, edited by D. Palacios González and J. M. Durán Medraño. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 117–131.
• Horvatinčić, S. (2024) “Footprints of Resistance: Material Culture and Memory of the People's Liberation Struggle in Socialist Yugoslavia”, in: Wer ist Walter? International Perspectives on Resistance in Europe during World War II, edited by E. Hašimbegović, N. Moll, and I. Pejaković. Sarajevo: Historical Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, 435–459.
• Horvatinčić, S. (2023) “Beyond the Modernist Paradigm: Critical Perspectives on Authorship in Yugoslav Memorial Production”, in: Shaping Revolutionary Memory, edited by S. Horvatinčić and B. Žerovc. Ljubljana/Berlin: Igor Zabel Association & Archive Books, 298–335.
• Horvatinčić, S. (2023) “From Storytelling to Re-enactment: Strategies of Monument-Making in Socialist Yugoslavia”, in: Shaping Revolutionary Memory, edited by S. Horvatinčić and B. Žerovc. Ljubljana/Berlin: Igor Zabel Association & Archive Books, 114–147.
• Horvatinčić, S. (2022) “'You're Taking Pictures, While We're Being Killed!' On Materiality, Art, and the Civil Contract of the Partisan Photo Archive”, in: Red Glow: Yugoslav Partisan Photography and Social Movement, 1941–1945, Konjikušić, Davor and Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung. Berlin, Boston: Deutscher Kunstverlag (DKV), 15–22.
• Horvatinčić, S. (2018) “Memorial Sculpture and Architecture in Socialist Yugoslavia”, in: Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980, edited by V. Kulić and M. Stierli. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 104–111.
• Horvatinčić, S. (2018) “Between Creativity and Pragmatism: A Structural Analysis and Quantitative Survey of Federal Competitions for Yugoslav Monuments and Memorial Complexes (1955–1980)”, in: Modern and Contemporary Artists' Networks: An Inquiry into Digital History of Art and Architecture, edited by S. Horvatinčić and Lj. Kolešnik. Zagreb: Institute of Art History, 124–165.
• Horvatinčić, S. (2016) “Ballade of the Hanged: Representation of World War II Atrocities in Yugoslav Memorial Sculpture”, in: Art and its Response to the Changes in Society, edited by M. Germ, M. Malešič, and I. Unetič. London: Cambridge University Press, 173–192.

Selected Journal Articles

• Horvatinčić, S. (2025) “‘They Stand There as Monuments to a Rather Peculiar Way of Life’: Historical Archaeology and Memorialization of Partisan Hospital Sites in Yugoslavia.” Historical Archaeology 59(3). (in print)
• Horvatinčić, S., Grgurinović, I. (2024) “Obmane infrastrukture: antropološki i ekohistorijski ogledi hidroloških zahvata u Drežničkom polju [Deceptions of Infrastructure: An Anthropological and Eco-Historical Study of Hydrological Interventions in Drežničko Polje].” Narodna umjetnost: Croatian Journal Of Ethnology and Folklore Research 61(1): 191–217.
• Horvatinčić, S. (2020) “Between Memory Politics and New Models of Heritage Management: Rebuilding Yugoslav Memorial Sites 'From Below'.” ICOMOS – Hefte des deutschen Nationalkomitees 87: 108–115.
• Horvatinčić, S. (2015) “Spomenik, teritorij i medijacija ratnog sjećanja u socijalističkoj Jugoslaviji / Monument, Territory, and the Mediation of War Memory in Socialist Yugoslavia.” Život umjetnosti: Journal for Modern and Contemporary Art and Architecture 96: 34–61.
• Horvatinčić, S. (2015) “Povijest nemogućeg spomenika. Podizanje Spomenika žrtvama fašizma u Jajincima [The History of Impossible Monument: Construction of the Memorial to the Victims of Fascism in Jajinci].” Anali Galerije Antuna Augustinčića 32–33/34–35: 261–282.
• Horvatinčić, S. (2014) “Monuments Dedicated to Labour and the Labour Movement in Socialist Yugoslavia / Spomenici posvećeni radu i radničkom pokretu u socijalističkoj Jugoslaviji.” Etnološka tribina: Journal of Croatian Ethnological Society 44(37): 153–168.
• Horvatinčić, S. (2013) “Prijedlog modela problemske analize spomeničke plastike iz razdoblja socijalizma [Model for the Analysis and Interpretation of Memorial Sculpture from the Socialist Era].” Radovi Instituta za povijest umjetnosti 37: 217–228.