– they played with different rhetorical operations within the language of art, but materialized mainly as paintings of conventional format, and executed in conventional techniques, like oil on canvas. “We are classics”, they stated, in an ironic manner, while they were still students, and they said that in order to oppose classifications. They wanted histories of their own, ones that escape the constraints of theory-led production, art-historian-dominated interpretation, and exhibiting within the framework imposed by curators. They wanted to create the context in which their work is produced, viewed and exhibited. That was Autonomism. In the late nineties, Uroš Đurić started exhibiting mainly without Stevan Markuš. He switched his preferred techniques from oil painting and charcoal drawing to electronic collages, photographs, performances and whatever else might come as the most appropriate medium for the realization of some concrete project. What he kept was a passionate attachments to self-portraits, so that his own image still played the “theoretical object” in most of the works, only the process and the final result were much more open with respect to the manner of realization that before. His major project for the end of the nineties, and the project through which he developed another referential frame for his works, was entitled The Populist Project. As the author stated himself, the main objective of the project was to show the interaction between the star system and identity. Its components were titled God Loves the Dreams of Serbian Artists, Celebrities, Hometown Boys and Pioneers. The images of the author featured in different segments of the project, presenting him as part of the most prominent football teams in Europe, in the company of various public personalities, on the cover of an imaginary magazine entitled “Hometown Boys”, and among the most prominent authors in the field of art production and interpretation from what was once geopolitically labelled as Eastern Europe, all of whom were shown as proudly wearing a red pioneer scarf, in a glorious posture taken from the iconography of socialist realism. With this project, he went against the stereotypical social and political, not so much art-historical framing of his works. While most left-wing scholars in Serbia dealt with the issue of populism as determined to serve the right wing ideology, he demonstrated that populism had no pre-articulated social implication, and that in order to enter the struggle in the public arena, one has to be able