Vladan Joler, a visual artist of international repute and longtime professor at Academy of Arts in Novi Sad, resigned after 25 years of work at the University. The winner of the "Silver Lion" at the Venice Biennale and an author whose works are part of the collections of MoMA in New York and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, explains that his decision was not impulsive, but the result of months of pressure and traumatic events.
The professors are, Joler says, we have been under enormous pressure for nine or ten months.
"I think that in the beginning this government recognized the students as its main problem. But when the students became so popular among the people, it seems to me that the criminal political elite turned their attention and began to deal more intensively with the professors. And then we from the Free University, from those informal organic groups of professors, became the focus of the regime's experience," says Joler in an interview for the new issue of "Vremena", which is on newsstands from Thursday, September 25.
Professors, he says, were forced to "fake teaching" through online forms that did not provide students with real knowledge, while they were required to sign worksheets.
"If we sign, we enter a vicious circle of lies, which is the basis of the entire problem - we are now falsifying teaching, giving legitimacy to the instrumentalization of teaching that we were forced into. About fifteen of us from the Academy of Arts said: 'We don't want to sign those worksheets that were introduced to us, because it is a lie'. By the way, we didn't even have worksheets before that, and now we have them," Joler points out.
The final trigger was the night of September 5, when the police stormed the Rectorate of the University of Novi Sad, where students and professors sought refuge from tear gas, after which Joler decided to resign.
"Imagine the situation: your principal keeps you with fifty armed men in a room for three hours, smiling. That principal is my chancellor. That was the moment I decided I could no longer be part of the system," he explains.
Resignation is not withdrawal.
However, Joler points out that his resignation does not mean retirement.
"Resignation is only one form of struggle. Integrity is important. People are ready to make sacrifices and this must be clear to this regime as well," he said.
He also warns about the bigger picture: "We have lost the state. We, as researchers, artists, civil sector, have to take on a job that is not ours, but the job of the prosecution, the police and the judiciary."
For him, leaving the University is temporary - an act of freeing the space from which he can act. "I personally believe that one day, I hope very soon, we will be able to free the University, and that it will once again become a place for the exchange of knowledge and freedom, and not a police station," concludes Joler.
Read the entire interview with Vladan Joler in the new issue of Vremen", which is on newsstands from Thursday, September 25. Here you can subscribe to digitally i printed edition.
