Ljubisa Ristic Named Acting Director of Atelje 212
Belgrade's City Assembly installed the director and former JUL official at the head of Atelje 212 without a public competition, on a term of up to six months, while the actors stay silent.
- Belgrade's City Assembly appointed Ljubisa Ristic acting director of Atelje 212 on July 24, 2026.
- The acting term runs for a maximum of six months, and the appointment was made without a public competition, under Serbia's Culture Law.
- Ristic (born 1947 in Pristina) is a director and founder of the avant-garde theatre KPGT, and was once a prominent member of the JUL party.
- The actors of Atelje 212 are so far silent: contacted by N1, they were either unavailable or unwilling to comment on the appointment.
There is a quiet irony in the fact that the fate of a theatre that spent decades building its reputation on disobedience is now settled at a city assembly session, by a vote in a hall where not a single stage light hangs. On July 24, Belgrade’s City Assembly named Ljubisa Ristic acting director of Atelje 212, and, on paper, this is an entirely routine administrative act. What is not routine is the name.
Ristic is no unknown. He is a signed directorial presence, a man whose staging and dramaturgical hand marked the Yugoslav avant-garde, the founder of KPGT in 1977, a theatre that built a shared language across four republics on a single stage. But the biography that gets cited selectively also has a second current: in the 1990s Ristic was a prominent figure in the Yugoslav Left, a party firmly tied in public memory to one very particular kind of cultural policy. It is precisely that second current that makes this more than a personnel notice.
What does an appointment without a competition say about cultural policy?
Serbia’s Culture Law allows a city to install an acting director without a public competition when a director’s term ends early or a competition fails, for a period of no more than six months. Legally, there is no dispute here. The problem is that temporary in Serbia’s cultural institutions long ago hardened into a genre of its own, a term without a deadline, a caretaker arrangement that no one is in a hurry to end. His predecessor in the post, Gordana Goncic, also ran the house as an acting director from the autumn of 2024.
Six months is enough to set a season, a repertoire and a handful of key premieres, which means that one person’s directorial poetics can be written into a full year of an institution that, in law, is someone else. When this is done outside a competition, the question is not only who gets the seat, but which names never entered the race that was never held. In the canon of Serbian theatre, Atelje 212 stands for Brechtian nerve and the first stagings of Beckett in this part of Europe. Placing at its head a figure from the institutional past of the 1990s is not a neutral move, and it is hard to imagine anyone in the hall expecting it to be read as one.
Silence as a message
The most eloquent response for now comes from the house itself, in the form of quiet. N1 contacted the actors of Atelje 212, but they were either unavailable or unwilling to comment on the decision. In an ensemble not historically known for restraint, that silence carries weight. It may be caution before a new director, it may be disagreement waiting for a better moment, or it may simply be fatigue with an institutional critique that repeats every few years with a new name in the headline.
Ristic inherits a house with a mythology larger than his mandate and an ensemble that, for now, receives him without a word. The coming seasons will show whether this is an episode of technical management or the start of something more lasting. Will you judge Atelje 212 under its new leadership by what it puts on stage, or by what the appointment itself already said before the first performance?
