“There are still assumptions that Yugoslavs were living in a totalitarian state,” curator Lina ǅuverović tells me over lunch at Nottingham Contemporary, on the opening day of her show, Monuments Should Not be Trusted. There’s a sense of anticipation in the air, as gallery staff apply finishing touches to displays and caterers bustle about in preparation for the launch party. And so there should be — rather incredibly, it is the first major exhibition of Yugoslav art ever to be held in the UK.

ǅuverović is right. There seems to be a strange blind spot in the UK when it comes to Yugoslavia, let alone its art. Mention the ex-country to a British person under 40 and the word will likely conjure little more than Tito, communism and the bloody wars of the 1990s. But for some from an older generation, particularly the thousands who went interrailing there to escape the gloom of 1970s Britain, Yugoslavia was a unique and hopeful place, not to mention a beautiful one. A socialist state quite unlike its Eastern Bloc neighbours, Tito’s Yugoslavia didn’t repress its citizens, allowing them freedom to travel and a limited form of consumerism, all the while carving out its own diplomatic path between East and West. “There was this sense of a society that was new, young and different, a sense of pride, especially over the Non-Aligned Movement,” says ǅuverović, who grew up in Belgrade before moving to the UK in the late 1980s. “We were doing something positive and independent. We were proud of our Yugoslav passports.”