About Jon

Jon Blackwood is a curator, lecturer and writer specialising in contemporary art. He has a particular interest in contemporary art in the Western Balkans, having lived both in Sarajevo and Skopje from 2011-14. He is now based in North-East Scotland.

He has curated exhibitions in Cetinje, London, Sarajevo, Skopje, Zagreb, Tallinn, Aberdeen and Edinburgh, and has experience of working with performance, installation, sound, video and relational art, in addition to more traditional media- painting and sculpture.

Jon’s particular interests are in contemporary art and activism, contemporary art and protest, cultural ecology, psychogeography and peripherality. Jon is passionate about football and is working on ideas relating to the crossovers between sport and fine art as disciplines.

Jon has published six books, and numerous articles. Most recently he has published Introduction to Contemporary Art in Bosnia-Herzegovina (duplex 100m2, Sarajevo, 2015) and Critical Art in Contemporary Macedonia (malagalerija, Skopje, 2016). Currently he is working on book and exhbition projects in Scotland and the former Yugoslavia.

His book, co-edited with Jasmina Tumbas, Contemporary Art in the post-Yugoslav Space : Case Studies in Hauntology will be published by Routledge in 2025. In the same year, another anthology, Contemporary Art in Bosnia-Herzegovina : Crisis, Rupture and Discontinuity, edited with Irfan Hošić and Claudia Zini, will appear with the same publisher. 

Having taught at various universities in the UK and in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Jon is now an Associate Professor in Contemporary Art at Gray’s School of Art, Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen. He is a member of the IKT- International Association for Curators of Contemporary Art, the Scottish Contemporary Art Network, and the Association for Art History.

You can follow Jon on academia.edu, on Instagram, and on twitter.