The book, "The Partisan Counter-Archive. Retracing the Ruptures of Art and Memory in the Yugoslav People´s Liberation Struggle" by political theorist and philosopher Gal Kirn examines the artistic and cultural production of Yugoslav Partisans during the Second World War. He illuminates how their reception and social agency has gradually changed over time to be finally contested by the politics of historical revisionism and nationalism in the 1990s. The book is structured around four chapters, a foreword, and an afterword. In addition to the text, the publication features numerous images and archival material Kirn acquired from various museums. The Partisan Counter-Archive thus reads as an important and timely contribution to the urgent discussions about the dialectics of cultural memory in a geo-political context marked by the struggle between a heroic past and an uncertain future.

Having in mind that interdisciplinary research on Partisan art is still a blind spot of academic research, "The Partisan Counter-Archive" demonstrates the necessity to reflect on the figure of the Partisan from the perspective of artistic and poetic production. In the introduction, Kirn explains that “the return to a Partisan past seems theoretically and politically urgent” as we are confronted with “the rise of Islamophobia, xenophobia against all minorities and refugees, patriarchal sentiments against women and even a return to the whitewashing of the colonial and fascist past are spoken of in official political discourses” (p. 3). In that sense, the book offers not only a thorough research on the history of Yugoslav Partisans, but reads as an attempt to mobilize the memory of antifascism for our contemporary struggles and practices of social dissent. In showing that the cultural and artistic production played a pivotal role in the political subjectivation of the Partisan movement, Kirn demonstrates a radical encounter between Partisan art and politics.

The ideological transformation of the socialist country into a multiparty system, which occurred after Josip Broz Tito´s death in 1980, coincided with the demonization of the socialist legacy. Currently, the cultural memory in former Yugoslav republics is shaped by right-wing oblivion engaged in openly rehabilitating fascist collaboration and paving the way for the free market. This cultural and political process results in a twofold discourse, which interprets the experience of socialist Yugoslavia either through the optics of totalitarianism, or nostalgia. Pinpointing this paradox, Kirn´s theoretical point of departure is “the grim landscape of post-Yugoslav culture and politics of memory” (p. 17). Deploying the analytical tools of critical theory, he is mobilizing archival material that has been omitted and exhausted through nostalgic narration.

Kirn achieves his intention by elaborating the concept of the "Partisan counter-archive". It serves him as a discursive site to reconstruct semi forgotten artworks and memories which can reappear as emancipatory works for the future. Furthermore, the concept presupposes “returning to the triangulation of Partisan art, politics and memory that moves from Partisan to socialist and finally post-socialist times” (p. 18). Together with the idea of the Partisan surplus, the Partisan counter-archive articulates a form of revolutionary temporality which can strengthen both the memory relating to fascist violence and the antifascist resistance. The idea of the surplus also signifies a break with the structures of class, colonial and national oppression and thus affirms a politics of liberation and emancipatory future. Accordingly, the book envisages to reconfigure both the fields of aesthetics and politics by pointing out their intertwinement.

Kirn diffracts the material of the Partisan counter-archive through a threefold lens. This allows him to identify its 1) unfinished nature, 2) the paradoxical and contradictory relationship between memory and revolution and 3) its potential for emancipation. In that way, the figures of the Partisan counter-archive and of rupture indicate a revolutionary process challenging the capitalist status quo and the empty, homogenous time of bourgeois historiography. In Kirn´s words, the counter-archive “takes side for trans-national solidarity and social justice yesterday, today and tomorrow […] triggering new ruptures in the future to come” (p. 68).

Elaborating the importance of the cultural production which was happening parallel with the war against fascists and their local collaborators, the introduction clarifies the aesthetic and poetic dimension of the struggle which came to the fore in the countless poems, paintings and photos that Partisan artists created in the period 1941–1945. In the first and second chapter, the author delineates a precise historical and political framework that allows the reader to comprehend the historical context in which Partisan art had occurred. Here, the emphasis is on photography, film and poetry. Due to their poetic interrelatedness, Kirn argues that Partisan artists invented new intermedial forms subversive to the canon, functions and institutions of bourgeois art. What is herewith brought to the attention is the agitational dimension of Partisan culture. Furthermore, as an engaged cultural practice, the Partisan counter-archive is the result of a collective art making, which goes against the grain of the romantic model of the individual genius. Instead, it offers new heuristic perspectives on contemporary discussions about alternative forms of artistic practices revolving around collectivity and shared authorship.

In the third chapter, the focus shifts from the period of the Second World War to the period of the 1960s-70s. This is the era in which important films such as Želimir Žilnik´s short film Uprising in Jazak (1973) and Miodrag Popović´s The tough one (1968) were produced. These films were conceived in a period which is known as the "Yugoslav Black Wave" and whose defining characteristic is the critic of the contradiction of socialist governance. Instead of reproducing the dominant image of the Partisan fighter from the 50s, Žilnik engages in affirming something that could be denoted as the "memory from below". On the other hand, being the first film to explicitly address war trauma, Popović´s film is a critique of the socialist state and its failure to engage with the revolution after the war.

At the same time, this period saw the building of some of the most remarkable monuments dedicated to the memory of the Partisan struggle. Analyzing monuments as examples of the perpetuation of the Partisan counter-archive, Kirn reveals how the desire for freedom (another word for the Partisan surplus) established the condition to create art in a Partisan way. Between 1945 and 1990, several thousand monuments across Yugoslavia were built to commemorate the victims of the war and the Partisan victory. Most of them were erected on historical sites where the struggles, or the executions of civilians and Partisan fighters took place. With regard to the monuments such as the one in Tjentište by Miodrag Živković (1971) or the "Monument to Revolution" by Dušan Džamonja (1972), Kirn illustrates that the counter-archive is not a figure of the past but one that allows to grasp an utopian future. In other words, these monuments present an aesthetic rupture, a break with regard to the affirmation of abstract forms. This form differentiates the monuments from similar objects and sculptures in the socialist East and the capitalist West, mostly consisting of realist (figurative) representations of victims and heroes. Hence, it can be concluded that “of all the objects produced in socialist Yugoslavia, the monuments to revolution came closest to capturing and formalizing the Partisan surplus” (p. 239).

The dialectical trajectory of the counter-archive, the ruptures, and aesthetic surpluses would not be complete without the articulation of the present-day situation. Thus, in chapter 4 Kirn discusses the revisionist tendencies and the right-wing politics of amnesia active in suppressing the memory of socialism. In this section, Kirn analyses the multiple iconoclastic acts which resulted in the destruction of more than 3,000 monuments during the 1990s. These examples of damnatio memoriae vividly show how the demolition of Partisan legacy served to transform fascist collaborators from perpetrators to victims. Hence, as an attempt to critically asses revisionist historiography, Kirn´s book asserts alternative protocols of remembering that are necessary both for academic research and for critical artistic and curatorial practices.

Grounding his discourse in the writing of authors such as Susan Buck-Morss, Louis Althusser, Walter Benjamin, Enzo Traverso, Alain Badiou, Gilles Deleuze etc., Kirn connects critical theory with archival research and aesthetic analysis. In doing so, the book expands the research on Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav memory politics which is pursued in the works of academics such as Jelena Đureinović, Jelena Subotić, Jelena Batinić, Bojana Videkanić, Davor Konjikušić, and Sanja Horvatinčić. Thus, "The Partisan Counter-Archive" is a timely contribution to the growing academic interest in Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav scholarship. In troubling times such as ours, with right-wing populism and xenophobia on the rise, this type of an engaged interdisciplinary research practice, traversing various academic disciplines and empowering us to remember the struggle of the oppressed and the excluded, is not only an example of courageous scholarship but an ethico-political intervention against the neoliberal and nationalist falsification of Yugoslav and European history.