DEFENCE & protection (2026)

In socialist Yugoslavia, schoolchildren learned a subject called General People’s Defence and Social Self-Protection. Under the motto “the enemy never sleeps,” students practiced putting on gas masks, throwing grenades and shooting rifles, preparing for a war that hovered somewhere between doctrine and imagination. Yet the teenagers sitting in those classrooms had other concerns: music, mischief, first love. Lana Mesić revisits this strange curriculum in her recent work DEFENCE & protection (2026). Through woodcuts of the original instructional manuals, military gestures begin to slip toward intimacy. The images echo the carvings teenagers leave in school desks: names, hearts, fragments of desire.