In spite of academic recognition of the art practices from the ’70s and ’80s, current historiography in Serbia has not covered all of it, particularly not the women artists. This paper argues for the idea of creating spaces for public recreation and archiving the fragile female art practices. Starting from the Fluxus perspective and the equivalence
of art and life principle, Dragana (Jovanović) Žarevac moves into the art-world with sound performances in SKC Belgrade, in 1979. Since the ‘90s, the experts have recognized her solely as a video artist known as the ZKM (Karlsruhe) awardee. However, her early Belgrade phase (1979-1988), related to performance, was omitted. More than 15 solo or in-pair performances have been performed in the galleries of SKC Belgrade, SC Zagreb, ŠKUC Ljubljana, Biennale of Youth - Rijeka, Hamburg (Boris Nieslony’s artist centre), Düsseldorf (Klaus Rinke’s class). This indicates that her performances were staged in the most important galleries in Yugoslavia, those which founded conceptual and post-conceptual art, but outside of the mainstream art-scene memory and thus, unfairly neglected. By the end of the 70’s and the beginning of the ’80s, the alternation of two waves of visual art happened in Yugoslavia: New artistic practices, based on the achievements of the avant-garde, and postmodernist tendencies. Since she integrates the elements of both standpoints, a more comprehensive research and historicizing of Žarevac’s work represents a missing link between the ’70s and the ’80s in the context of heterogeneous Serbian and Yugoslav visual art. Musically educated, integrating minimal music, the achievements of the OHO group, La Monte Young and body art, Dragana Žarevac, dedicates herself to analytically structured performance staging archetypal polarities. Drawings, scores, synopses, textual and photographic material provide insight into the very structural processes of building the artwork and carry the potential of archiving performance.