About Jon

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

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.

Currently he is working on research projects in the former Yugoslavia, most notably leading Rewind Yugoslavia: Video Art 1969-91, funded by the AHRC, along with colleagues from Gray’s and DJCAD, University of Dundee. The project will construct an archive of video art production from the former Yugoslav space, with a conference at V&A Dundee and a publication with John Libbey publishers envisaged in 2027.

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. Contemporary Art in the Post-Yugoslav Space : Case Studies in Hauntology , co-edited with Jasmina Tumbas,was published by Routledge in 2025. This year, another anthology, Contemporary Art in Bosnia-Herzegovina : Crisis, Rupture and Discontinuity, edited with Irfan Hošić, will appear with the same publisher.  Previous books include Introduction to Contemporary Art in Bosnia-Herzegovina (duplex 100m2, Sarajevo, 2015) and Critical Art in Contemporary Macedonia (malagalerija, Skopje, 2016). In more recent times he has written on art, political crisis, dictatorship and cultural work in the context of Belarus here and here.

You can read most of Jon’s outputs via RGU’s worktribe page here, and follow him on academia.edu, on Instagram, and on soundcloud, where his Novy Mir podcast has been running since 2016.