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The specific socio-political frame and context in Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SRJ) was in many ways unique in Europe. The way social space was produced, starting from mid eighties in the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRJ) in the period of severe economic and political crises, and later in the new independent republics formed after it’s disintegration, was extremely harsh. The new SRJ had an especially peculiar context due to the sanctions of UN that were introduced in 1992 after the clashes in Bosnia and cases of ethnic cleansing. One of the causes for the production of such a drastic social space could be seen in the strongest wave of ethnonationalism recorded in recent European history, accompanied with the equally strong wave of populism, that were interestingly enough conceived as a program of Serbian national and cultural renaissance in the highest cultural institutions in Serbia like the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts and Association of Writers of Serbia, and supported by the Serbian Orthodox Church. After being recognized as a powerful homogenizing force by the communist elite that came to power, Slobodan Miloševi's being its strongest representative, these ideological matrixes thus induced their reproduction in all spheres of the society. On the other side the sanctions by UN and isolation of the country caused the "economy of destruction", economic collapse with the highest rate of inflation ever recorded. The effects of these phenomena were devastating for the new SRJ, where thus produced social milieu was dominated by patriarchalism, authoritarianism, a warlike spirit, xenophobia, and national-chauvinism. In Miloševi's Serbia of the 90’s after introduction of the multi party parliamentary democracy, two public spheres have functioned in autonomous way: one official having all the monopolistic instruments from the former communist ideological structures, and the other alternative and oppositional having just support from a few alternative media houses and mainly the streets for public address and speech. When the wave of ethnonationalism and populism came back from the political realm to the sphere of culture and contaminated it, the highest national institutions of culture started to reproduce this ideological matrix. The task of the artworks was to glorify the history of Serbian people and they could be read as symptoms of the social pathology of the milieu where they originated. Their performative role was to contribute to the production of such a social space and reproduce the hate speech so present in all the media. For the artists who didn't want to conform to the dominant ideological matrix the trauma experienced had different effect and caused strong reaction. One aspect was the withdrawal from the social sphere into the closed, hermetic artistic circles and the strategy defined as active escapism; another was gathering into groups and associations with the aim to criticize, oppose, and face the social reality with engaged artworks. Finally, I focus on different artistic strategies towards the produced social space and analyze both the art practices that reproduced the dominant ideological matrix in the use of the regime, as well as the ones that tried to enter the publics sphere in the critical way and offer the alternative model of the (cultural) public sphere. The paradigm for the analysis of the Serbian art scene or community in the period of sanctions and isolation, mostly in the first half of the nineties, but also encompassing the whole decade, was the one of the “art in the closed society”. As much as this formulation was explanatory for the situation in Serbia under the sanctions, my perspective on the problem is that self-isolation by the artists was more important that the outer wall of barriers, and what mattered was the decision of the majority of the artists to stay out of the public and social spheres. In the global age of informational society where Internet was providing all necessary information on the actual happenings in art, the paradigm of the closed society could be more used as a psychological feature of self-isolation and withdrawal from the reality as it was too hard to bare it. I am therefore focusing mainly on art practices that were trying to deconstruct the dominant ideological matrix, create platforms and arenas where artists could engage in cultural activity and raise different critical issues, and eventually construct the alternative cultural public sphere where many >marginal< voices could be heard, many micro-social spaces could be visible.